Shinigami no Naruto: Jinchuuriki Tails
by Rahlian
Summary: Part Two: Naruto, having awakened the dormant power of his soul, leaves Konoha with Tenten, Hinata and Jiraiya, planning to unite the Jinchuuriki against those who hunt them. NarutoxBleach, NarutoxTenten, NarutoxHinata, NaruxTen, NaruxHina. Chapter Ten: Sand
1. Leavetakings

**Shinigami No Naruto **

**Part Two: Jinchuuriki Tails**

**Chapter One: Leavetakings**

Naruto and Jiraiya stood before Tsunade, the blond Hokage finishing some paperwork, signing her approval with a flourish of her pen. Shuffling the papers slightly then picking them up and tapping them against the wood of the desk to straighten them out, Tsunade handed the packet to Shizune for filing or delivery. Once Shizune had departed, Tsunade settled her gaze on the two ninja, causing both to straighten into parade attention. Tsunade flipped a hand at the duo, a signal for them to relax. Jiraiya settled into a not-so-subtle leer at Tsunade's bosom as the briefing began. "Afternoon Naruto," Tsunade began. "How do you feel?"

Naruto absently rubbed the scar on the left side of his chest, all which was left of the bullet wound that Tenten had given him at the Valley of the End. "Better. I don't have any problem with the shortness of breath anymore. My burns have completely healed. And the needles around my heart are gone too."

"Very good," Tsunade replied, nodding in a satisfied manner. "Well then, I think that you are completely recovered and ready to return to active duty." That was the best news that Naruto had heard in a long time. Having to endure two weeks of forced inactivity had left him irritable and short tempered, even with Hinata and Tenten. So when Tsunade said he could finally return to active duty, happiness was a weak adjective to describe the emotion he felt. He trembled for a few seconds before he thrust a fist towards the ceiling followed by the rest of him. His cry of "YATTA!" was cut off midsyllable by Jiraiya's fist meeting the crown of his head.

"No need to get so excitable brat," Jiraiya growled, Naruto's exclamation giving new fuel to his hangover. Once Naruto shook the swirls from his eyes, he stood up and after glaring at Jiraiya he refocused on Tsunade.

"So why did you call me up here Granny? You could have told me in the hospital without this guy here"

"Very true. The real reason why I have called you here is because I am assigning you an A-rank mission. Naruto, with your mother's permission, I am officially apprenticing you to Jiraiya. You will be accompanying Jiraiya on his travels for the next two to three years. As you are well aware, the organization of nuke-nin calling themselves Akatsuki is after you. While you remain in Konoha, they can be sure where you are, and that makes you vulnerable. And that is absolutely unacceptable. With Jiraiya, you will have his undivided attention to train and protect you."

"Protect? I don't need protection!" The sharp crack of Tsunade's meaty palm coming into contact with the desk cut him off.

"Wrong Naruto. You have at least two, possibly as many as nine S-rank criminals after your head. I do not mean to insult you, but were you in the bingo book you would have a B-ranking at best. Against the kind of ninja that Akatsuki is made of, you stand no chance."

"What about my team?"

"Hinata and Tenten will remain here in Konoha. They will probably be split up to fill holes in other genin teams until you return." As soon as the words were out of her mouth Tenten and Hinata were through the door, a flustered Shizune hot on their heels.

"I'm sorry Tsunade-sama, I tried to keep them out but they wouldn't listen."

Tsunade silenced her apprentice with a curt look and focused on the two intruding kunoichi. "Good afternoon Tenten-san, Hinata-san. What, may I ask, do you need that is so important that it necessitates interrupting an A-rank mission briefing?"

"Hokage-sama. Forgive us for interrupting," Hinata began, slightly out of breath, "but we request to be added to the mission roster."

"And why would I do that? You are just genin. You are not qualified to be added to an A-rank mission." At this, Hinata stumbled. She couldn't say that the reason she and Tenten had was that they did not want to be separated from Naruto for several years. Glancing sideways to Tenten, Hinata hoped that Tenten had come up with something better than "because we would miss him." Tenten unfortunately looked as uncertain as she did. But as both girls looked at one another, trying to come up with anything that sounded like a remotely legitimate reason, Jiraiya, spoke.

"I wouldn't mind letting them come along. I can teach three genin just as ably as one."

Tsunade said nothing for several long seconds, staring her ninja. "Oh come on Tsunade-hime. You don't need a pair of genin that badly, and they can learn more from me than anyone else here, unless you are planning to take them under your wing? And it isn't like an extra pair of genin would make things that much more dangerous."

"Alright you two, I assume that you were listening to the whole briefing? Yes, well I hope that you are sure. There are at least two S-rank nuke-nin, probably as many as nine, after him. Were either of you two to stand between Naruto and Akatsuki, they would have no compunction against killing you."

"You mean they would treat us like any other enemy combatant?" Tenten asked.

Tsunade opened her mouth to reply, but said nothing, unable to refute Tenten's logic. "Yes, they would treat you like an enemy combatant. Just as long as you are cognizant of the danger." They nodded in unison. "Far be it from me to deny true love. Well, Jiraiya, looks like you just got yourself a team. But if any of the characters in your next novel bear anything more than a passing resemblance to any of those three kids, I will be looking for a new spymaster." Long since having been inoculated against Tsunade's threats, Jiraiya's smile barely faltered. "Shizune, add Higurashi Tenten and Hyuuga Hinata to the roster as well." Shizune, who had been standing in the doorway during the discussion, voiced an affirmative and ducked out the doorway.

"When do you want to leave?"

Jiraiya thought about it for a few seconds. "I am sure that the kids will want some time to say goodbye, so tomorrow, I think. That should give me some time to finish up one or two things I need to tie up here as well. Nothing to do with my research," he assured the volatile Hokage.

"Alright then, dismissed. Saluting, the five ninja about-turned and left her office. The group stopped outside the main doors of the Tower and split up, Naruto and his teammates going home to start packing.

OoOoO

Tenten did not have many possessions, so it took her and Naruto less than an hour to pack all her stuff. Naruto had left to run a few errands, or so he said, so she had been left to her own devices for the time being. She left her apartment, locked the door behind her and started walking. It felt strange, to be leaving for so long. It was just two weeks shy of one full year since they had graduated the Academy and become fully fledged Konoha shinobi. If everything went according to plan, by the time she and her team returned, they would have been out of Konoha for longer than they had officially been ninja. She was still a little incredulous that the Hokage had caved into her and Hinata's request so easily. She had gone in fully expecting to have to fight tooth and nail for her and Hinata to be included in the mission. So when Tsunade acquiesced almost without any argument at all, she was surprised to say the least.

Still, she wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She was just glad to be going with Naruto and not be left behind.

As she walked, she noted teams of Naruto clones working on the reconstruction. It had been a little over a month since the invasion and the reconstruction was only now really getting going, although it was hastened quite a bit with two thousand-odd extra helpers. Most shinobi were out assisting, including the genin cells that were still taking missions. She and Hinata had been exempt from helping out, for the most part, since Naruto, the nominal leader of their team, had been put on bed rest, and that meant no training or physical labor. Of course, Naruto wasn't one for following rules when he could get away from it, hence the shadow clone reconstruction force.

Arriving at her destination, she opened the door, the familiar jingle of the bell sounding in her ears. The Higurashi Weapon Shop looked exactly the same as she remembered it, taking mostly superficial damage during the invasion. "Mom? Dad? Anyone here?"

Tenten heard feet pounding on the second floor, and then on the stairs. "Tenten-chan?" Chichi crouched down to look at Tenten from between the bars of the banister before hurrying all the way down. "How are you? Are you okay?"

"Yeah Mom, I'm fine. Is Dad around? I need to talk to you two about something."

"Yeah, he is uh... KOUSEKI! IT'S TENTEN!"

Kouseki emerged from the back room a few seconds later, wiping his hands on an already dirty cloth. "Tenten-chan, how are you?"

"I'm fine Dad. I just wanted to come over to let you know that I have been assigned a long-term mission, A-rank."

"How long-term?"

"At least two years, maybe longer." Kouseki and Chichi knew better than to ask for details about the mission. Had either one of them been shinobi, Tenten would have been able to be more forthcoming, but civilians were not issued security clearances.

"Do you know when you have to leave?" Kouseki asked the only question that Tenten would be able to answer.

"Tomorrow."

"Do you need any equipment? Kunai, shuriken, wire, oil, whetstones?"

Tenten nodded her head. "Dad, can I get the molds you made for my ammunition and whatever gunpowder you have left?"

"Sure thing Tenten-chan. Do you need any ammunition made now?"

"No, I still have most of the last batch I made before the invasion. I just need the molds and gunpowder so I can make more when I need to."

"What about a forge?"

"Most towns have a smithy in them. I can rent one out when I need to. If I can't, it isn't like it would be hard to make a temporary forge somewhere else. It isn't like I need a full smithy."

"Alright then. You sure that is all you need?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"Do you want your stuff sealed or just packed away."

"Seal it up please."

"Ok, be right back."

Chichi shifted uncomfortably once Kouseki had left, mirrored by Tenten. Hard words had been said, the last time they had spoken, and neither one knew how to take back what had been said. Silence reigned unbroken until Kouseki returned. Tenten took the proffered scroll and was pulled into a hug by her father when she did. "Be safe Tenten-chan. Write us when you can, please?"

"When I can," Tenten agreed.

"Good. We love you." Kouseki finally released his only daughter, and the three stood in awkward silence until Tenten gave a jerky farewell and left.

"You didn't say anything to her?"

"No," Chichi muttered. "I don't know what to say to make her listen."

"She is an adult now," Kouseki reminded Chichi.

"Hardly. She is thirteen."

"She is a shinobi. You can't judge her solely by her age anymore. The last few months alone prove that."

"Thirteen is too young for marriage, no matter what."

"You are going to have to accept that Tenten makes her own decisions now Chichi-chan. She has her own life that has nothing to do with us anymore. There are some lessons that she has to learn for herself, and this is one of them."

"I just don't want her to regret anything. That boy is tricking her, I know it."

"If he is, then she will figure it out sooner or later."

"I would rather she not have to figure it out at all."

"I know, Chichi-chan. I don't want her to get hurt either, but in her profession, it will be unavoidable."

"I still don't understand why you let her attend the Shinobi Academy in the first place."

Kouseki sighed. "It is in her blood. I don't think that she would have ever been truly happy otherwise."

"She would have been happy enough," Chichi replied. Turning away, she returned upstairs before Kouseki could say anything else. Shaking his head, Kouseki returned to the back room, the oddness of the conversation making him chuckle. It was remarkable how their positions had reversed, his and his wife's. When Tenten had fist graduated, he had been the one opposed to Tenten interacting with Naruto. Now he was defending her decision to accept Naruto's proposal. What differences time could make.

OoOoO

Hinata been home for twenty minutes when a senior Branch Hyuuga knelt in the doorway to their suite, he had to clear his throat three times to gain the pair's attention. Naruto looked at the pair of Branch servants for a moment when their motions slowed to a halt, then looked to the sitting room. Knocking on the end of the open door to get Hinata's attention, Naruto jerked his head back to where the other Hyuuga knelt in the doorway.

"How much you wanna bet that is your dad wanting to talk about the mission?" Naruto had long since given up his speculation as to how the hell Hiashi seemed to know as much as the Hokage almost as quickly. Hinata looked back over her shoulder to where the servant knelt, waiting to address them. Leaning forward over the large luggage scroll, she knelt beside, she placed her hands on the circular sealing array inscribed before her, twisted her hands slightly as she channeled the requisite chakra to her hands and watched as the bundle of clothes vanished in a puff of smoke. Rocking forward slightly, she pushed off her knees and stood up. Naruto stayed in the doorway as Hinata approached the servant.

"Hinata-sama, your father requests your and Naruto-sama's presence in his chambers, post-haste."

"Told you," Naruto muttered as they were escorted from their suite to Hiashi's outermost chamber. The servant and opened the sliding door front he pair, and then closed it behind them. The servant remained by the first door as the pair moved across the room. When everyone was properly seated Hiashi tucked the sheaf of paper he was perusing in to a drawer. Studying Naruto and Hinata for a few interminable seconds, Hiashi broke the silence in his usual manner when dealing with subordinates. That is to say, abruptly and without preamble.

"I am most concerned about the A-rank mission that the Hokage has assigned your squad Naruto-kun. I understand the reasoning behind your assignment. As Jiraiya-sama's apprentice and a Jinchuuriki, it would be foolhardy for you to remain in Konoha. However, Hinata's inclusion is troublesome. As a possessor of an unsealed Byakugan, your wellbeing is a concern. I can see no legitimate reason for you to be assigned to this mission."

"Well," Naruto replied in a smug manner, glad for an opportunity to one-up Hiashi, "that is not a decision for you to make. The Hokage saw fit to put her on the mission, so that should be good enough for you." They might have been allies of a sort, but they were far from friendly. Hiashi's flinty stare would have intimidated Naruto once, but not anymore.

"What I am wondering is exactly why my daughter and your other… teammate… have been included. Neither of them has been apprenticed to Jiraiya-sama, and while I do not doubt that Hinata-chan could benefit from his instruction, Jiraiya has not taken a student on in close to twenty years, not since your biological father. So forgive me if I fail to see why he would be amenable to taking a whole genin cell on now."

"I guess he was feeling nostalgic," Naruto replied. "It was his idea to include Hinata-chan and Tenten-chan." Hiashi studied Naruto's too-wide smile for a few seconds while Hinata whispered at him furiously and Naruto made soothing noises back.

"Liar," Hiashi proclaimed while Naruto continued to smile.

"You're right," Naruto conceded without missing a beat. "But the reason why Hinata was included is immaterial. The only thing that matters is that she was included, by the Hokage no less and that should be enough for you. You should know now that I love Hinata-chan unconditionally, and I would do everything in my power to keep her safe. So you can stop worrying about her unsecured Byakugan because the only way anyone is getting their hands on her Byakugan is if I am dead. And as I have proven, I am not easy to kill. Besides, Hinata is no pushover herself. And we will have Ero-sennin with us too. So it is not like she will be without protection."

"Be that as it may, as powerful as Jiraiya is, he is only one man. And even Jiraiya can be defeated or even killed."

"However true that may be, the fact is that the Hokage personally put Hinata on this mission. But before you go to Granny Tsunade to complain, I would keep in mind that she is not the Old Man. Is there anything else you want to discuss, because Hinata and I need to keep packing?"

Hiashi gave Naruto a sharp look before answering. "Actually, yes, there is." Pulling a scroll about as long as Hinata's arm and only slightly thicker out from a drawer in his desk he handed the scroll to his daughter. Hinata gasped eyes wide as saucers when she held the scroll. "Fa-father, you…is this… I mean, it exists?"

"They do. That is a copy I had made for you recently. Open it up and look inside." Gently setting the scroll on the desk, she carefully unfurled the scroll. Quickly activating her Byakugan, she scanned the first part of the scroll.

Peering over Hinata's shoulder, Naruto scrunched his face in confusion. "I don't get it, the scroll is blank."

"To the eyes of normal humans, it would be. But to the enlightened eyes of a Hyuuga, that scroll filled with the deadliest hand-to-hand combat techniques in the world."

"What, are they some super-secret Jyuuken moves?"

"Of a sort," Hinata replied absently. "There are three levels of the Jyuuken commonly taught, the first two to all Hyuuga and the third reserved for the Main Branch. There is a quasi-mythical fourth tier that allows the user to kill with a single touch. This scroll has the nine forms of the Dim Mak, the Fist of Death, written down. Supposedly, the final form, the Soul Death, allows the user to rip the soul out of a living person with their bare hands."

"But I thought you could already do that with the normal Jyuuken."

"Contrary to popular belief, the Jyuuken is a fairly nonlethal taijutsu style, with only a handful of killing techniques. The Jyuuken can be used to kill, like all martial arts, but it is mostly centered on dealing temporary disabling damage, rather than lethal damage."

"Uh, okay, I guess."

Hinata sighed. "To put it simply, by and large, the Jyuuken does not kill. The Dim Mak, however, does nothing but kill."

"Well, I guess that makes sense. Being called the Fist of Death and all."

A moment after Naruto stopped speaking, Hinata's eyes leaped to her father. "Do I know it?" Hiashi asked before Hinata said anything. "No, I don't. The Dim Mak is something that was taught to the first Hyuuga by the Shinigami himself, or so the legend goes. But it was deemed too dangerous and was eventually forgotten by most. I had a feeling that something was going to happen soon, and had this made. I cannot say why, but I believe that you will have need of this before too long."

Hurriedly rolling the scroll back up, Hinata stood and bowed to Hiashi before scurrying out the door. "Well then, if there is nothing else, I think I will take my leave as well." Nodding to Hiashi, he had almost made it out the door before the Hyuuga Patron spoke again.

"Be careful, Naruto-san. There is a storm gathering on the horizon, and I believe that you will be at its center."

"Thanks for the warning," he replied seriously, and left.

OoOoO

Naruto found Hinata sitting on the futon staring at the scroll on her hands. "I can't believe my father gave me this," Hinata said when Naruto sat down next to her.

"Sounds pretty amazing, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it kinda does. Every Hyuuga grows up on stories about the Dim Mak. The fighting style that uses the power of the Shinigami itself. I mean, I never actually thought it existed."

"Well it does, and you have the proof right in your hands." Hinata didn't respond for a few seconds so Naruto took her chin in his fingers and turned her face so he could kiss her on the lips. Hinata closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss. When Naruto pulled back a few seconds later, Hinata hugged him, resting her head on his chest.

"Sorry about that."

"Nah, it's fine. Must be pretty unbelievable. You okay now?"

"Yeah. I'm just glad that he had this when you asked. My father does not like challenges to his authority. I am sure that my father will do something to pay you back for being so rude to him, even in private."

Naruto grinned. "Maybe so, but we are leaving tomorrow for at least two years, so whatever he plans will be put on hold until at least then, assuming he can hold a grudge over something that minor that long. And that is something I can deal with. And it isn't like I can't take care of myself."

"I know you can, but that doesn't stop me from worrying."

A light laugh came from Naruto's lips at that. "And that is just one more reason I love you." Hinata giggled and gave him a peck on the lips. Pushing herself to her feet, she went into Naruto's room, Naruto following her, leaning on the doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest as Hinata unrolled the large luggage scroll. "Don't trust me to pack enough underwear?"

Hinata gave him a look over her shoulder that said exactly that. "Come on Hinata-chan, stop worrying about the mission," Naruto whispered in her ear from behind. "There will be time enough for that later. Anyways, it's almost dinnertime, and I'm hungry. Feel like going out?"

Hinata rolled her eyes. "Let me guess, Ichiraku's?"

Naruto shrugged, as if to say, what can I do? "Well, we are leaving for the next couple of years soon. And we haven't been there in forever."

"We were there Sunday."

"And it is Wednesday, two days is the next best thing to forever." Sighing, Hinata gave in. Naruto pumped a fist low and hissed out a "yes," drawing out the "s" sound. Grabbing his gama-chan wallet from the dresser, one of only a handful of things left that had not been packed away and slipping the baldric to his zanpakuto off the peg by the door, they left. Practically skipping as he held her hand on the way to his favorite restaurant, the only thought n his mind was which flavor of ramen to order first. Holding the privacy flaps to one side and letting Hinata enter first like a proper gentleman, he gave a cheery hello to the elderly proprietor of the best ramen bar in the world.

"Good evening Naruto-kun, Hinata-sama. Eating here or to go?"

"Eating in tonight Ayame-nee-chan."

"Alright then, what can I do for you tonight?"

Naruto didn't even bother to look at the menu printed on the large board hanging behind and above Ayame's head before ordering. "I will start off with a Hokage-sized beef ramen, then a miso, chicken shrimp and finish off with a Konoha Supreme."

"What about you Hinata-sama?"

"Medium chicken ramen, please."

"Alright then, one Hokage beef, one medium chicken coming right up." Hinata and Naruto waited in comfortable silence as they waited for their meal to arrive. Ayame had gone to the rear to give her father their order and there was no one else in the bar at the moment, so the silence was unbroken, except for the ambient sounds of the foot traffic filtering in from outside. Three minutes later, an elderly man with a spotted white apron and spotless white cap approached the counter, two steaming bowls in hand. Setting the food down on the counter in front of his customers, he pulled a pair of chopsticks from a pocked in his apron and set them across the downs. Ichiraku Teuchi let Naruto and Hinata break the chopsticks apart, give thanks and eat a few bites before saying anything.

"How've you been Naruto? Been a while since I have seen you."

"Fine. Been busy, what with finding Tsunade and helping out with the reconstruction and all. At least until tomorrow."

"What happens tomorrow."

"Long-term mission."

"How long term?"

"Two or three years, not really sure." Ayame wanted to ask more, but knew better. Naruto would tell them all he was allowed to, and not a word more. "Gonna be spending it with Ero-sennin, training."

"Your whole team?"

"Yeah. Mom got sent off to the capitol, so the pervert is taking her place."

"That is quite an honor."

"Mixed blessing. When he and I went looking for Tsunade, he stole my money and spent most of it whoring and drinking. I will spend as much time trying to get him to train me as actually training, if not more. He is strong, no doubt about it, but he is a bum the rest of the time."

Teuchi and Ayame looked shocked that Naruto would speak like that about one of the Legendary Three. Hinata just shrugged when they looked to her. "It's true, for the most part. When he isn't drinking, he is peeping, when he isn't peeping he's… in the red light district," she euphemized, unable to bring herself to actually say "whoring." "He is the author of Icha Icha, after all."

"Don't worry though. I have developed several techniques to combat his lazy lecherousness. 'Sides, if he ever tried to peep on either of my girls, I would pound him into next week, after they finished with him."

The rest of the meal was spent in silence as Naruto and Hinata finished their meal. Naruto told Teuchi when they were leaving the next day so they could see Team Nine off.

OoOoO

The silence was unbroken in the deserted Academy, classes having dismissed for the day, the only people still in the building were the teachers themselves. The silence was only emphasized by the soft, almost undetectable whispering of Hinata and Tenten's sandals and Naruto's geta. Opening the door to Iruka's classroom, Naruto walked in.

"Hello Naruto-kun, Tenten-chan, Hinata-sama."

"Afternoon Sensei," Naruto replied. "What are you doing right now?"

"Grading papers." Iruka set his pen down and leaned back in his chair. "Need something?"

"No, just wanted to come by to talk to you, that okay?"

"Yeah, I can spare a few minutes for my worst student."

"Hey, I will have you know that it was all an act!"

"All of it?"

"Well, _almost _all of it."

"Now that I could believe."

"Whatever. I am the Lightning Legion, what use have I of silly school grades?"

"Well, had your mother not taught you the Shadow Clone Technique, you would have had a lot of use for them because you need them to graduate."

"Grades are for people who don't have my built-in awesomeness to rely on."

Iruka rolled his eyes. "You are a fluke Naruto. A one in a million happenstance. Never happened before, never will happen again. You graduated because of the Kyuubi."

"Had it not been for the Kyuubi, I would have passed with flying colors. Not even the Nine Tails has enough anti-awesome to counter mine."

"There are so many flaws in that argument I don't even know where to start."

"You don't know where to start because there are no flaws."

Iruka facepalmed. "There is just no winning with you is there?"

"Nope." Naruto couldn't have been prouder. But his smile slid off his face as quickly as it had arrived. "But there was something that I wanted to talk to you about Iruka-sensei."

"I'm listening."

"Well, two things actually. The first is we are going to be leaving soon, for the next couple of years. I finally got officially apprenticed to Ero-sennin, and we are going to be leaving Konoha with him for training."

"Tenten-chan and Hinata-sama too?"

"Yep, all three of us."

"Well that is interesting. Been a while since he has taken a student, let alone three."

"I know. That kind of ties into the second reason I wanted to talk to you. Have you ever heard of an organization called Akatsuki?"

"No, can't say I have."

"We don't know much about them, but what we do know we are pretty sure of. There are nine members, each S-rank missing-nin. They have been operating as a mercenary force, bounty hunting and hiring themselves out as fighters. But most importantly, they seem to be after the Jinchuuriki, or more specifically, the Biju."

"That… that is bad."

"Yeah, no kidding. They have some pretty hardcore members too. I ran into Itachi Clan-killer and the Monster of the Mist, Hoshigaki Kisame."

Iruka paled under his tan. "And you made it out alive?"

"I wouldn't have, had it not been for Jiraiya. They fled pretty quickly after he turned up."

"Yeah, I would imagine."

"In any case, they blew their hand. Apparently, Ero-sennin has known about them for a while now, and while he won't tell me who is source is, he told me that they were not supposed to start making moves on the Jinchuuriki for another two years, at least. I think that we somehow managed to stumble on them while they were in the middle of a job and they decided to take a swing at me and missed."

"That… is pretty scary Naruto."

"Tell me about it," Naruto said, grimacing. "I was pretty damned lucky that Jiraiya happened to walk in on them as they made their move. Had Ero-sennin been two minutes later, I would have been gone. In any case I have been thinking about Akatsuki a lot lately, and how they are planning on gathering all the Biju. I want to use you as a sounding board for an idea of mine."

"Really, a barely trained, rookie chunin like you has a plan on how to deal with nine S-rank criminals? This ought to be interesting." Everyone looked up to where Jiraiya was hanging upside down, looking in through one of the opened windows.

"How long have you been there?" Naruto demanded.

"From the beginning, more or less." Jiraiya swung down through the window and leaned on the sill. "I got bored so I decided to follow you three around. You do tend to get into interesting situations when I am not around."

"Whatever. Anyways, as I was saying, whatever Akatsuki wants with the Biju, it is bad. I want to go to the other Jinchuuriki and we form our own organization, one to counter them. I already know the Sanbi's host pretty well. We teamed up during the second stage of the Chunin Exams and we both passed. I think she would be willing to at least hear me out on this. I don't know how much resistance I could run into with the others, but with Sora's agreement, I think it is possible to at least get everyone to meet. Worst comes to worst, at least they will be warned."

The silence stretched for what seemed to be an eternity as the others tried to wrap their brains around what Naruto was suggesting. "Naruto," Iruka began in carefully measured tones, but cut himself off when Jiraiya leaned forward.

"Naruto," Jiraiya began again, "what you are saying you want to do is… monumental. I don't think you realize exactly what you are undertaking here, what an effort this Jinchuuriki alliance would be. And there are any number of problems with the concept itself. First of all, were you to succeed with your plan, you would have accomplished what a century of negotiations would have failed to do. The 'treaty' standing between the five Elemental Countries is little more than a simple nonaggression pact, and that is barely worth the paper it is on. There is no mutual defense clause if someone were to attack, and no way to embargo another country. Second, I don't think you realize how little freedom most Jinchuuriki have. The Jinchuuriki are the ultimate weapons, the ace in the hole for any country that has one. Their movement is carefully monitored, every step outside their home village scrutinized. At the end of the last war, there are agreements as strong as laws made forbidding another country to send its Jinchuuriki into another Jinchuuriki-possessing nation. You would have to go to the Daimyo and receive permission to even approach one of the other Jinchuuriki-possessing nations."

"What about the mission to Kirigakure? I was on that mission."

Jiraiya sighed, already knowing that this was going to be a headache. "That is because your team was requested specifically."

"They can do that?"

"To a certain extent," Iruka replied. "Any client requesting a specific individual or team is subjected to intense scrutiny. I don't have to tell you that we shinobi make enemies all the time, so when someone wants a particular person sent, we have to make sure that it is not an ambush."

"Okay, but that does not explain the mission to Kiri. How could we have been requested when they did not know we were coming?"

"Sarutobi and the Mizukage had been in contact prior to your mission, and you were sent to deliver the formal invitation."

"So the mission was a sham?"

"No Naruto. Your mission served a purpose, even if you cannot understand it right now. In any case, we seem to have drifted from our original subject. Drop it Naruto," Jiraiya told the chunin when it looked like he was going to protest. "In any case, I hope that you appreciate the amount of work that this is going to entail. If you are serious about this, then I will support you when you go to Tsunade."

"I am. Akatsuki has already tried to take me once. I don't know what they want with us, but whatever it is, I doubt that it will be anything good. The fact that they want the Biju is grounds enough to want to stop them. You said it yourself Jiraiya-sensei. We Jinchuuriki are the ultimate weapons. The time is coming for Akatsuki to learn just what that means."

Jiraiya smiled at the determination in Naruto's expression. "And I wouldn't expect anything less from my student. Assuming that Tsunade allows you to go forward with your plan, the first thing we will need to do is get the diplomatic and traveling papers you are going to need. I have contacts within the Daimyo's court and your marriage to Hinata should make that somewhat easier."

Hinata brightened when she realized what Jiraiya was talking about. "All senior members of the Bloodline Clans in Konoha are automatically granted a lordship equivalent to a royal Minister when they come of age."

"Exactly," Jiraiya said. "Otherwise you would have to be established at court first."

"Well, at least my marriage has finally done some good." Naruto winced as soon as the words were out of his mouth, raising his hands defensively and turning to Hinata to apologize.

Hinata silenced him by putting a finger to his lips and offering a small smile. "Relax Naruto-kun. I know what you meant."

Naruto took her hands in his and kissed her knuckles before turning to Jiraiya. "So where do we start?"

OoOoO

The group waited with bated breath an hour later as Tsunade leaned back in her chair behind her expansive desk, fingers steepled as she considered Naruto's absurd idea. After almost two full minutes of silence, the Hokage swiveled around to face Naruto and spoke. "Naruto, as altruistic as your plan is, there are some things that I must know before I can okay this. First, do you have any idea as to where your organization will be based?

Before Naruto could speak, Jiraiya answered. "As you know the Land of Iron is the only truly neutral country, having served for the location for any number of shinobi summits in the past. I know the man who leads it, a man named Mifune. As you know, the Land of Iron has suffered in the past at the hands of ninja, both during the Secret Wars and during peace time. I am sure he would support any initiative that would increase good will among the Elemental Countries. Assuming we can get this past the Daimyo, that will be one of the first stops we will make."

"Okay, I can accept that for now. What kind of leadership is there going to be? Who will be in charge of this group? And what about funds?"

"Honestly, at this point, I can't say. Right now, all I am aiming for is for getting everyone to just meet. Everything else can be worked out once I get everyone to sit at the same table."

Tsunade considered what he said for a few seconds before responding. "Alright Naruto. I will back you on this, with conditions. First I want oversight. Any action your group takes has to be approved by me. Second, I want someone there to represent Konoha. Third, any intelligence you receive is passed straight on to me. Lastly, any charter your group adopts must have a clause preventing any member of your group from gaining access to any material or intelligence resources within Konoha."

Naruto was shaking his head before Tsunade had finished. "Your first two conditions are unacceptable. I trust you Granny, but I am not going to risk having my group fall under the Council's influence. If that were to happen, that would be the end of anything I try to do. You know the Council would have absolutely no qualms about doing whatever they think is necessary to gain an edge over another country. As for your second condition, Konoha can have a representative, but only in a strictly observatory role. The only reason my plan has a wisp of a chance of success is because me and my fellow Jinchuuriki are Jinchuuriki, and have a vested interest in seeing Akatsuki eradicated. I am not going to see my group hijacked and destroyed to further some politician's agenda. The only people, and I mean only, who will have any say in anything my group does are those directly involved. I will share any intelligence I receive with you as a matter of course, but I will not go hunting for secrets for you."

Several seconds passed as Naruto and Tsunade matched wills. Suddenly, Tsunade leaned back and grinned. The sudden change in demeanor seemed to throw Naruto for a moment. "Good Naruto. I hoped that you would object to my conditions. If you could not stand up to me, I would have withdrawn my support. To make this idea of yours work, you are going to have to stand up against a lot of powerful people, people who are going to want to use you to fulfill their agendas. Be sure to keep in contact. I will try to help as much as I can. Let me know if you ever need anything. People, material, funds, I will do what I can for you."

Naruto offered a grin to match hers. Thanks a lot Granny. You don't know what it means to me."

"Yeah, yeah. Now get the hell out of my office before I start crying." Showing teeth, Naruto led the exodus from Tsunade's office and out onto the street. Naruto turned to the group and spread his arms in an expansive gesture, taking in everyone in front of him. "So how about a celebration for getting my plan approved?"

Iruka opened his mouth to agree, but Jiraiya cut across his words. "Sorry, but we can't. We grown-ups have to discuss some things about your upcoming mission." Before Iruka could disagree, Jiraiya clamped his hand down on Iruka's shoulder and vanished in a Body Flicker. The three teens looked at one another uncertainly, blinking in surprise at the hasty exit.

"Well, that was weird, even for Ero-sennin." As one, Hinata and Tenten agreed. As it seems we have some time alone, what do you want to do?" Grinning mischievously, the two women grabbed Naruto's arms and jumped to the roofs.

OoOoO

The next morning, Naruto stood yawning and fiddling with his chunin flak jacket. Even after two weeks, he still wasn't used to wearing it. The thing wasn't particularly bulky or heavy, but it did restrict his movements a little. He had to get his trench coat altered to fit over it. Hinata and Tenten had arrived at the gate with him, but Jiraiya, Tsunade and the Ichiraku's were still absent. Most of the other three teams of the Genin Twelve had arrived, the last few stragglers arriving. Tenten and Hinata were speaking to Ino and Sakura while Naruto conversed with Shikamaru. Apparently, Tsunade was already planning ahead, and had assigned Shikamaru as Konoha's liaison to Naruto's group. Shikamaru had accepted the assignment with his usual grace; but was planning logistics with Naruto readily enough. It had already been agreed that Naruto would contact Shikamaru via the toads when he had something to report. Shikamaru would in turn pass the information onto Tsunade.

Eventually, the two Sannin arrived and it was time to depart. Hugs were exchanged, hands were shaken and promises were given. The next time Naruto returned home, it would be at the head of an organization powerful enough to rival anyone but the Hidden Villages themselves.


	2. Into the Wild Blue Yonder

**Chapter Two: Into the Wild Blue Yonder**

**A/N: First of all, infodump impending.**

**Second, I am using a bastardized military hierarchy cobbled together from the existing systems of several different countries, so before anyone says that something is wrong, it is because I changed it.**

**And sorry it took so long to post this. I um… have had this done for a couple of weeks and I… seem to have forgotten to post it… Better late than never though. Happy Holidays all!**

The first night after leaving Konoha, after camp had been made and dinner eaten, Jiraiya gathered them in front of the fire. "Alright, as I am sure you are well aware, our first stop is going to be the Fire Capitol there are many things you three must know before approaching the Daimyo. How much do you three know about how the government works outside of Konoha?"

Naruto and Tenten gave Jiraiya matching blank looks. Hinata raised her hand, waiting for Jiraiya to wave a hand in her direction for permission to speak. "Well, as everyone knows, the Daimyo is the head of government, but the national military runs just about everything outside of the Self-Governance Zone, and the military is dominated by the nobly-born samurai."

"Wait, Self-Governance Zone? What is that?"

"Did you even attend a single Social Studies Class Naruto-kun?" Tenten asked.

"Not when I could avoid it. And I pretty much slept through what classes I did attend."

"Still, you should have at least heard of the Self-Governance Zone."

"Nope." Jiraiya knew how thickheaded Naruto could be, but there were some gaps in his knowledge that just boggled the mind. "I mean, I paid attention in most classes, even if I didn't look like it, but math and Social Studies were the two classes that always put me to sleep for real."

Jiraiya was pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to keep his calm. "Hinata-chan, if you please?"

"Basically, what you need to know is that when Konoha was founded, the Shodai Hokage got the Fire Daimyo to create a Self-Governance Zone around Konoha. As long as we do not work against the interests of the Fire Country, we are pretty much left to our own devices. Inside the SGZ, just about everything but the issuance of currency is under the Hokage's purview. That includes taxation, policing, public works, infrastructure and the like. The Daimyo has the authority to issue command directives to the Hokage and not much else."

"So what does that mean?"

"Essentially, we do missions for the Daimyo for free whenever he needs us to and in return we control everything except the printing of money."

"Exactly," Jiraiya continued. "Now, obviously given the size of the national military, it is run differently from the Hidden Villages, both in organization and scale. Under the shinobi system, where there are a relative handful compared to the national military, there are five official ranks, genin, chunin, tokubetsu jounin, jounin and village leader. The national army is hundreds of times bigger than the shinobi corps are, so they have more ranks than we do. There are two basic types of personnel: enlisted and officers. There are a few subdivisions, but all you really need to know are the basics.

"The seven enlisted ranks are buck private, private first class, lance corporal, corporal, sergeant, sergeant major, command sergeant major. The nine officer ranks are warrant officer, lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, lieutenant general, major general and General of the Army. Now, as ninja have to interact with the national army on occasion, and by extension the samurai, all shinobi hold honorary ranks in the army, based on our shinobi rank. Genin start out at command sergeant major, chunin at captain, jounin at colonel and Kages at General of the Army. Tsunade and I hold a rank of lieutenant general because of our special status as Sannin."

"What about tokubetsu jounin?" Tenten asked.

"Well, as you know, tokubetsu jounin are ninja that have jounin-level skill in one area. In the shinobi system, that places them between chunin and jounin. But the army's system works slightly differently. The equivalent of a tokubetsu jounin are warrant officers, who are the technical experts who have specialized knowledge in a single field."

"So, tokubetsu jounin are lower ranked in the national military than in Konoha?"

"Not exactly Naruto. Warrant officers are kind of to the side of the rest. Warrant officers start off between command sergeant major and lieutenant, but they can hold commands equivalent to and in special cases over commissioned officers. Now, as Hinata-san already said, the samurai run just about everything outside of Konoha. Did Anko ever tell you about the tripod of power supporting the Fire Country?"

"Samurai beats ninja, ninja beats monk, monk beats samurai?"

"Ah, well that is one way of putting it, I suppose. Oversimplified, but accurate more or less." Naruto just grinned. "In any case, it is the samurai who pretty much run the entire national military. Beyond the enlisted/officer division, you also have a commoner/noble split in the military. At the lower levels, you have commoners vastly outnumbering the nobles, but the balance tips farther toward the nobles the higher up the command chain you go. For example, you would never find a samurai below the rank of lieutenant, barring special cases. On the other hand, there is only one commoner who has been promoted to general officer in the last ten to fifteen years or so. As you can probably guess, the samurai live up to their reputation of formality and rigid organization. Shinobi are the antithesis of samurai in every sense of the word, so we are not quite persona non grata in the capitol, we are far from their favorite people. And that brings me to my next point. Remember those three scrolls Tsunade gave you? Open them up."

When the trio did, they saw a set of blue uniforms in front of them. Picking the coat up, Naruto examined it. "Are we going to be wearing these in the capitol?" The uniforms were made of neutral blue cotton. The pants had two front pockets and a thin red stripe running down the outside seam. The trousers were tucked into a pair of shiny black cavalry boots. Form-fitting black shirts were worn under a coat, the bottom of the coat cut high enough to expose the beltline of the pants. The left side of the coat buttoned closed over the right, in the approximate middle of the clavicle, but folded back at a diagonal, opening up at top of the manubrium, or just under the throat. Naruto and Jiraiya's coats had a gold cord that hung from the shoulder to the left pocket. A high collar came up to the chin and then folded down again.

"Correct. The samurai don't like ninja, and ninja don't like the samurai, so to keep them happy, we pretend to be one of them when in their territory. Nobody will mistake us as actual soldiers, but a show of discipline and formality will keep them happy, or at least willing to let us in."

"So we pretend to be part of the army so that they can pretend that there are no ninjas in their city?" Tenten asked.

"Pretty much. It is silly and frankly ridiculous, but they are the ones running the show. And it is not that big a deal. They want to pretend we don't exist, let 'em, I say. Anyways, a few rules to follow while we are in the capitol, whenever spoken to, let me answer or Naruto if I am not with you. A rule of thumb is enlisted soldiers is to be seen and not heard. The only time you should answer a question is if you are directly addressed. An officer is always to be called 'sir,' never by name unless otherwise indicated. When meeting someone, the lower ranking individual will salute first and then the higher ranking person will. In public, Naruto or I are to be referred to as 'sir,' and you will be called 'sergeant,' your full rank only used when an officer first addresses you, or in a formal setting. Generally speaking, you two," Jiraiya said pointing at the two women, "treat officers as if they were God, and other enlisted soldiers as you would anyone else. When in doubt, do as I do.

Jiraiya turned to speak to Naruto. "Once we reach the capitol, news of our arrival will travel pretty quickly. You are going to have to address the Daimyo at some point, so you have to make sure that you make a good first impression. We will be put off at first, possibly up to a week, to see what kind of person you are. I know the Daimyo, and he will decide whether to approve your request or not based on what kind of person he thinks you are as much as the actual merits of your argument. The army does not start recruiting until eighteen, so everyone will have at least ten years on you, probably closer to twenty. Many will try to test you by insulting you or ignoring you. You cannot allow that. The traits the Daimyo respects most are charisma and strength. If a lower ranking officer or enlisted soldier fails to make his obeisance, you have stop and press the issue until they do, short of physical violence. The majority of those you will encounter will see a thirteen year old kid, and not your double silver bars. It is important that you display the proper force of will, if you don't the Daimyo will most likely deny your petition."

"What about Hinata-chan and Tenten-chan?"

"What applies to you also applies to them, but it is less important that they act their rank. The only trouble they should get is from an officer who takes offense at their gender. Any enlisted man would have more than enough sense to leave either of them alone. Insubordination is only for the politically ambitious and really stupid. Few officers would gain anything from showing Tenten or Hinata up. The only reason anyone would try to mess with your women is to get at you. In any case, the national army does not accept women into their ranks, so they will stick out like a sore thumb, but not much more than you will."

OoOoO

It was early morning before the group walked up to the great gates of the capitol. The walls extended as far as the eye could see, constructed of silver-streaked white stone without a visible join or crease. The walls were easily as high as Konoha's, and manned far more heavily. There was not much of a line waiting for admittance, but Jiraiya breezed past those waiting and addressed the sergeant standing in the doorway of the guardhouse. "Your name sir?"

"Lieutenant General Kyushu Jiraiya, accompanied by Captain Hyuuga Naruto, and Command Sergeants Major Hyuuga Hinata and Higurashi Tenten."

"Reason for visit?" The sergeant flicked his gaze to the three teens and put two and two together. But Jiraiya saw the metaphorical lightbulb click on over the man's head and saw him catch himself before he scowled at them.

"I seek an audience with the Fire Daimyo." Were the man in question anything less than general rank, the sergeant would have questioned Jiraiya further, but he knew he was not likely to get a better answer. Besides, whatever the lieutenant general wanted, it likely was political, and that was far above his pay grade. The fact that the lieutenant general was not actually a lieutenant general was irrelevant. Jiraiya of the Sannin was well known, even outside the shinobi world, and he knew that the man could gut him without a second thought. That and the fact that he was accompanied by three children, one of which was a field officer only made it even more obvious that they were shinobi, were it necessary. But they were following the proper protocols, and so the sergeant said nothing. Shinobi provided distasteful, but critical services to the government, and according to the unwritten rules, as long as they pretended to be soldiers, and did not draw undue attention to themselves, he had no reason to deny them entrance. Stamping Jiraiya's well-thumbed passport, as well as the three children's all-but-virgin ones, he saluted and let them in.

Urashima Military City was a seething metropolis hundreds of times bigger than Port City. The captain and two sergeants stared in wonder at the sights within the walls. Jiraiya, immune to such strode on. Back in Konoha, other than the Hokage's Tower, there were few building over three stories. Here, most were at least five, some rising ten or more. And the broad boulevard they were on was at least four times as wide as any back home. Here the streets were at least thirty feet wide to a side, a median with thick green grass and small trees dividing the two sides. Anywhere else, Naruto would have said that the flagstone streets were excessively wide, but the crowd further on proved that they were as wide as they needed to be.

Next was the sound. The chatter of a hundred thousand voices, the brays of thousands of oxen and whinnies of horses, the squeal of a hundred ungreased axles, the snap of dozens of whips all created a clamor of incredible volume.

Finally was the smell. Sunbaked cobbles, unwashed bodies, the grassy scent of horse dung and a thousand other odors created a smell that was quite unlike anything else Naruto or the two girls had experienced. It was not exactly unpleasant, but it was far from palatable.

Suddenly bursting out in laughter, Naruto wrapped his arms around Hinata (who was the one closest to him) and bent her over, kissing her enthusiastically. Naruto laughed again at the looks he got. "This is it, he said. "This is where it will start, the beginning of my master plan."

"Calm down Naruto. Do not forget, nothing has been approved yet. Your entire plan is still contingent on the Fire Daimyo's approval. And he is by no means certain to do that."

"I know that Ero-sennin," Naruto replied, "but it is just being so close has me excited."

"Well, as long as you know that. Now, we need to get ourselves established somewhere. It will be a few days before we will be able to see the Daimyo, and we need to have a place to wait until then." Naruto nodded and the three teens followed. "What do you three know of Urashima Military City?" Jiraiya asked, but continued before any of his students had the chance to answer. "Urashima Military City, also known as the Two-Toned City has been around in one form or another for the last two or three hundred years. It wasn't until the formation of the Hidden Village that the capitol of the Fire Country was relocated here and the city renamed after the Daimyo who engineered the treaty that led to the creation of Konoha, Urashima Hideyoshi. Originally the location of the Fire Country's high command, it was not until the relocation of the capitol that the White and Black Cities were formed." The reason behind the name was instantly apparent. "When the Daimyo decided to move his capitol here, the original town was surrounded by what would come to be called the White City, and is the civilian half of town. As you can probably guess, the White City is called the White City because of the white outer wall and the whitewashed stone and brick the buildings are made of. The inner part of the city is called the Black City, from the jagged spike of black rock that the rest of the capitol is built around." The mountain was small in the measure of such things, only about one thousand feet, but it was still the highest point for hundreds of miles.

"The mountain has been hollowed out and filled with miles and miles of corridors, rooms, halls and audience chambers to fit all the accoutrements of the bureaucracy. The stone that was been removed was used to build the military base surrounding the base of the mountain and the wall surrounding it all. The Final Redoubt is one of the major reasons why the Fire Country has never been fully conquered. It is said, more than half-seriously that whoever controls the Final Redoubt, controls the Fire Country. " And they could see why. The outermost white wall was huge, twenty feet tall or so, and half as wide, but the wall surrounding the mountain was considerably larger. Naruto estimated that it had to be at least fifty feet tall and he could only guess how thick.

Conversation lapsed as Jiraiya led them through the warren of side-streets until they arrived at a smallish three-story structure only a hundred yards from the black inner wall. Apparently, the main thoroughfare that the main gate opened to circled the Black City one and a half times, spiraling in towards the Black City, terminating at a gate on the opposite side of the inner wall from the main gate. If one knew his or her way around the city, it was often faster to cut through the narrow alleyways and side streets that rarely continued in a straight line for more than fifty feet. It would have been a journey of minutes had they been able to travel on the roofs, but the rooftops were heavily patrolled by the city guards and took a dim view anyone trying to use the roofs as a shortcut, so dim in fact that it might as well be opaque.

It took the better part of an hour to transverse the streets and arrive at the Flame of the West, a trip that would have taken five minutes anywhere else. The Flame was a whitewashed stone inn, the upper two stories overhanging the ground floor on all side, the brilliantly red clay shingled tiled roof proclaiming the building's purpose. Unlike most inns, there was no sign hanging over the door, a stylized tongue of red flame emblazoned on the plain wood door instead.

Jiraiya breezed in through the door and was almost immediately greeted by a fat balding man wearing a spotted white apron. "Jiraiya-kun! Welcome back my old friend!" The innkeeper quickly closed the distance between him and the sennin, taking the hand Jiraiya offered and pulling him into a hug. The innkeeper thumped Jiraiya's back several times before releasing him from his embrace. "What are you doing here? And on official business no less," he said, waving a hand at Jiraiya's uniform. "Been a while since I have seen you all dressed up."

"Tell me about it," Jiraiya replied. "Must have been right after that thing with the Hyuuga, what ten years ago now?"

"Something like that," the innkeeper agreed. "In any case, what has brought you back to our great capital?"

"Shinobi business," Jiraiya muttered.

"I figured. Care to share?"

"Not at the moment, but you should be hearing about it soon enough."

"Well, when have you ever left the city in the same state that you arrived in."

"Well, there was that one time during the Third Shinobi War."

"That doesn't count. One, you were only here for a few hours, and two you were hiding in the cellar the entire time."

"It isn't my fault that the damn Three Storms were on my ass."

"That would be debatable. In any case, you going to introduce your companions?"

"I might as well Ben. Ben, these are my students, Hyuuga Naruto and Hinata and Higurashi Tenten. Naruto, Hinata, Tenten, this is Nakamura Benji."

"Students? Been a long time since you have taught anything."

"Not since Minato and his team," Jiraiya agreed.

Examining Naruto, Benji's eyes widened in surprise. "Say, you wouldn't happen to be the Lightning Legion would you?"

"Yeah," Naruto replied carefully. "How do you know about that?"

"How do I know about it? Kid, half the country knows about you. Tapes of the Final Exam sold out in record time."

"Wait, what? Tapes of the Final Exam?"

"Yeah, you didn't think that the Chunin Exams were only watched in Konoha did you?"

"Uh, yeah, I kinda did."

"Well, here's news for you kid: the Chunin Exams are one of the most highly publicized events in the world. Live broadcasts are only in whatever village it is being held in because of the lack of long-distance infrastructure, but the tapes of the Exams are sold all around the world eventually. It would be hard to say whether it will be sold in Earth or Lightning Countries first, but it will get there eventually. Of course, the results are known as quickly as distance allows, but it takes quite a bit longer for videos to be available."

"So I am world famous then?"

"I wouldn't say that, brat. You don't get to be called famous until you are in at least three bingo books."

"It is okay to admit you are jealous, Ero-sennin. After all, it was not until you duked it out with Hanzo that you became famous. I am only twelve and I will soon be as well-known as you are."

Jiraiya rolled his eyes. "Whatever brat. I have nothing to prove to you. Ben, would you mind showing us to our rooms?"

Benji slapped himself on the forehead. "Of course. Here I am leaving you out in the entryway. Come, I'll show you where you will stay." The four 'soldiers' picked up their luggage and followed the innkeeper up the stairs to their rooms. Benji gave them four of the better rooms adjacent to one another, not the best, but a far cry from the servants quarters at the same time. None of their rooms had a sitting room, but it was a lack that nobody missed.

Everyone quickly unpacked their possessions and regrouped in a private dining room that Benji had given them. Jiraiya and Naruto left a few minutes later, Jiraiya giving Hinata and Tenten the rest of the day to be at liberty, warning them to be careful and not get lost. The three teenaged ninja had taken notice of the occasional patrol of soldiers while in the White City, but it wasn't until they entered the Black City was the army's presence really felt. Of course, the Black City was their part, so it only made sense. And it only increased the closer they got to the Final Redoubt. Even at the outer edge of the Black City, there were a handful of civilians interspersed with the rifle-toting soldiers.

In the White City, Hinata, Naruto and Tenten had mostly been ignored, but here in the Black City, it seemed that every pair of eyes was tracking Jiraiya and Naruto. Naruto rolled his shoulder uncomfortably at the sensation. Jiraiya put a large hand on Naruto's shoulder and gave the boy a wink. It was obvious that they were not real soldiers, Naruto's age marking them, but by the same token, nobody accosted them as they approached the massive fortress that was the Final Redoubt. Covers were tipped and salutes exchanged where appropriate, and they were generally allowed to be, a few hard looks notwithstanding. Apparently what Jiraiya had said about the unwritten rules was true.

Jiraiya was able to breeze in past the guards at the entrance of the mountain, but trying to gain an audience with the Fire Daimyo took a bit more effort. The two had arrived at the Redoubt shortly before eleven in the morning, but it was closing in on five in the afternoon before anyone was willing to see them. Unwritten rules aside, it seemed that everybody else took priority over them.

After hours and hours of doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs, they were finally allowed to see the majordomo. The majordomo was a surprisingly youthful man, thick-lipped with a blond flaxen beard braided into a square. The office was spacious, but not as much as one might expect from someone of his position. His desk, on the other hand, was. Fully ten feet from side to side, and nearly half that front to back, it was huge enough to make Naruto wonder how the man behind the mammoth desk was able to reach anything at the ends of the table. And there were things at each side, and all in between, little wire trays filled with paperwork stacked several high, using almost all of the space. As the four shinobi entered, the majordomo tapped a thick sheaf of papers to line the edges up and clipped them together with a yellow metal binder clip. A the blond man tapped out a rapid pattern with his fingers against the surface of the desk and a wire tray glowed blue and floated over to him. Placing the sheaf of papers in it, he nudged it back towards where it had come from and it floated back to its place.

"Okay, that is one of the cooler seals I have seen. That has to be a seal in the desk there, am I right?" Jiraiya gave Naruto a sharp glance as he took a step ahead of his student and gave a slight bow to the man behind the desk.

"Jiraiya-san," the blond man stated with obvious displeasure. "Been several years since I have had the experience of your presence."

"Likewise Werjau. And you know as well as I that I am only here because I must. My companions and I will be out of your city as soon as our business here is completed."

"And what would that business be?" The man, Werjau, asked.

"I seek an audience with our Lord, on a matter of some urgency."

"Obviously, or you would not be here. I take it you have something more than just news, and want something outside your Hokage's authority?"

"It concerns the Biju."

Werjau frowned. "You don't say. Anything concerning the Nine even tangentially is certainly worthy of notice. I take it that is why Uzumaki-san is here?"

"Actually, it is Hyuuga now, but what do you mean by that?"

The majordomo sent Jiraiya a look, which was returned with a shrug. "The Daimyo likes to be kept abreast of what happens in his Hidden Village. To get to the point, what do you need?"

"I think I should let Naruto here explain, as it is him that is reason why we are here." Werjau nodded at Naruto to step forward and speak.

"I am not sure how much you know, but essentially there is an organization hunting me and the other Jinchuuriki. We don't know why, exactly, but whatever they want with the Biju it can't to be to spread peace and love. According to our best intelligence, this group is composed solely of S-rank missing-nin. I want the Daimyo's permission to approach the other Jinchuuriki and form an organization to counter Akatsuki."

"And you need the Daimyo's approval to approach any of the other Jinchuuriki nations. Diplomatic credentials, free travel pass, et cetera, correct?" Naruto nodded. "Well, given that this is the first I have heard of this, I take it this is not time-sensitive."

Naruto glanced at Jiraiya. "Well, they aren't supposed to make their move for another two years or so,-"

"What I thought," Werjau interrupted. Tapping his desk, a wire rack levitated over to his little workspace. "Unfortunately for you, the earliest I can schedule you for is the week after next. The Daimyo holds audiences on the first and third Tuesdays of each month. The next audience I can schedule you for is October 5th. If you had gotten here two days ago, then you would have been able to see him yesterday, but as you did not you must wait."

"October 5th? We can't wait that long!"

Werjau rounded on Naruto almost before the words were out of his mouth. "Yes you will. As Jiraiya said, this Akatsuki is not expected to do anything for another two years at least. Now, if you had news of slightly greater import, I would try to get you an audience sooner, but as things are, you can wait."

"Am I not supposed to be a lord here or something? Can't I demand to see him?"

"You know about that? Well let me tell you something; you are only a lord in name only. And be grateful for that, as it is the only reason why you are being allowed to address the Daimyo at all. You know the exit; see yourselves to it."

Naruto opened his mouth to argue some more, but Jiraiya clamped his hand on Naruto's shoulder and steered him out of Werjau's office.

OoOoO

Tenten had not wasted much time after Naruto and Jiraiya had departed before leaving the inn. Jiraiya had taken the most direct route to the Flame on the way in, so they had gotten to see very little of the White City. Tenten made sure to keep track of her meandering, taking careful note of landmarks so that even if she were to get lost, she could find her way back to the general vicinity of the inn.

Attired in her blue uniform under her trenchcoat, she had strapped her gunbelt on over her pants. A thirteen-year-old girl in Army uniform and trenchcoat, she drew a great many looks, and not a few stares. None went past giving her a brief glare, and few even went that far. Nevertheless, Tenten pulled her arms from her sleeves and rested her hands on the grips of her pistols for comfort.

One thing that she had noticed when they had entered the city was the kinds of guns that the enlisted soldiers seemed to carry. Her rifles were antiquated by the admission of the old man that had gifted her her first rifle, at least twenty years out of date. She had made a few small modifications to her firearms, most significantly the electrum plates used for her elemental cartridges, but for the most part, her original rifle and the copy remained unchanged from the manufacturer's specs. Her rifles were .577 calibre muzzle loading rifles. The barrels were fairly long, the thirty-nine inch barrel making the fifty-five inch long weapon less than half a foot shorter than her, and not exactly light, just under ten pounds apiece.

The rifles that the enlisted men carried seemed to be somewhat shorter, by maybe six or seven inches. The rifles did not seem to be muzzle-loading either, with no ram visible. The trigger guard was stretched to cover the other three fingers of the trigger hand, although none she saw had any sort of scope mounted on them. Even the officers seemed to carry a more modern pistol, similar enough to what she used, except what appeared to be some sort of grooved cylinder above the trigger. She couldn't very well go up and ask to have one, so she did the next best thing.

The various rank insignias were still fairly fresh in her mind, so she picked a spot in front of what seemed to be an inn or tavern and seated herself on a bench placed there. There were a couple of battered in cups attached to the bench, presumably so that sitters could sit outside and have a cup of wine or beer or tea or whatever they happened to drink without the owner of the establishment worrying about having his cups stolen. Although, it probably would not take much effort to snap the chain and walk away.

Tenten did not wait long, a group of three privates and a corporal passing by in short order. Taking a bracing breath, Tenten stood up, squared her shoulders, and strode up before the soldiers. She had put her trenchcoat away in a scroll so her rank was plainly visible to four men in front of her.

"Sergeant," the four enlisted halted before Tenten, saluting. Tenten returned the salute and asked, "where are you four going, Corporal?"

"Ah, nowhere in particular, Sergeant...

"Higurashi, Command Sergeant Major Higurashi."

"Just on routine patrol Sergeant Higurashi."

"Good. Follow me." Tenten turned away and gave the soldiers a wave, motioning for them to follow her. She led the way into the building that she had been sitting outside of. It was an inn, not quite as prosperous or well-kept as the Flame of the West, but as long as it had a private dining room, it would be good enough for her needs. The sudden entrance of five soldiers did not go unnoticed, the innkeeper hurrying over immediately.

"Morning, Sergeant," but he was cut off before he got any further.

"I have need of one of your private dining rooms for an hour."

"Ah, of course. If you do not mind my asking, what exactly do need?"

"Just a private room for a little while is all. An hour, and we will be gone. You will be compensated, of course, for the use of your dining room."

"Of course," the innkeeper agreed. Gesturing to the hallway, he led the five to the well-appointed dining room partway down the hall.

Tenten led the four soldiers into the room, closing the door behind them. The four soldiers came to something halfway between attention and parade rest when the door closed, sealing them in with Tenten. All four were relatively young, the corporal not older than twenty or so, faces roughened by whiskers, yet still bearing traces of acne. Tenten had turned from the four men, pulling out a blank scroll and unrolling it across the length of the table. A pen and a set of small screwdrivers and a matching magnifying glass were placed on the paper before Tenten faced the four soldiers that she had commandeered.

Pointing she said, "give me your weapon, private."

The private in question hesitated, starting to slip his rifle from his shoulder, but looking toward his corporal at the same time. The corporal only hesitated for a split second before stepping forward, one arm outstretched to keep the private behind him.

"Sergeant, I am sorry but I feel that I must ask what exactly is going on here."

"Nothing sinister, I assure you corporal. I just wish to have a look at your firearm is all."

"And why is that?"

"Because, yours seems to be of significantly more advanced design than any of mine are, and simply put, I want to see how it works." Tenten gestured to the table behind her, where the scroll, jewelers tools and pen was. "My guns are... antiquated... to say the least. All I want is to see how yours work, so that I can improve upon mine."

"Guns, as in plural?" the corporal asked.

"Several," Tenten confirmed.

"Are they muzzle-loading? Or breech-loading?"

"Breech-loading?"

"Do you load them from the front or the back?"

"Front."

"Well, I could see why you would carry several around then. You are probably using a Pattern '53, quite popular in the country."

".577 calibre, with three bands?"

"Yeah. Old, but reliable." The corporal seemed to size her up for a moment. "Probably about as tall as you are, if not taller."

"I have six inches on the longest of my guns, you know." Tenten was beginning to feel a little uneasy with the corporal, chatty as he was. Jiraiya had said that they were not likely to receive a warm welcome in the city, but the corporal was being quite friendly, enough to put her guard up. She was not like Hinata, insomuch as she did not have a valuable bloodline, nor was she like Naruto, who was already making a name for himself. The only thing that was worth kidnapping her over only one other person should know about, and he was the last person to go spilling the beans.

"I don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but why are you being so helpful? You know I am not actually a soldier in your chain-of-command."

"I take it that this is your first time in the capital?" Tenten nodded. "And you were told about the unwritten rules, obviously." Another nod. "And were told about the anti-ninja bias that most officers hold?" One last nod. "Well, for the most part, it is only the samurai, and by extension the officer corps that do not get along with your kind. Most enlisted soldiers don't have much of a problem with you."

"I see."

The corporal turned and picked his rifle up from where it had been resting against the wall. "This is a Model '92 lever-action repeating rifle. Now, the biggest difference between your Pattern '53 three-band and these is that it is, as I already said, a repeating rifle." The corporal laid the gun down on the table and took one of Tenten's smaller screwdrivers and opened the side of the rifle. The corporal methodically disassembled his gun, making sure that Tenten fully understood each part functioned.

It actually took closer to two hours than one, but by the end, Tenten had a complete schematic of the Model '92 repeating rifle, and an idea or two on how to make it even better. Tenten led the four men back outside.

Tenten made her way back to the inn that she and the others were staying in slowly, strolling along at as sedate pace, taking in the sights as it were. Tenten had not been as sheltered as Naruto or Hinata had been, having visited other towns in Fire Country with her father on business, but even Port City was nothing in comparison to Urashima Military City. The black mountain that was the Final Redoubt loomed large over the city, omnipresent, a constant weight pressing on her. She only got lost twice in the rabbit's warren of side-streets that composed the greater part of the White City despite the careful mental notes she had taken when leaving the inn, something that surprised even herself.

OoOoO

Unlike Naruto, who had gone with Jiraiya to try to get an audience with the Fire Daimyo in the Black City, and Tenten, who had wanted to explore the White City, Hinata had chosen to remain at the inn. She had returned to her room as soon as Jiraiya had given her and Tenten permission to leave. Unrolling the large luggage scroll that everything else had been packed in, she quickly found the scroll that her father had given to her before leaving. It was smaller than the luggage scroll by a good bit, only about a foot and a half tall and about six or eight inches thick, but it was crammed with handwritten text, with hardly any margins left. There were illustrations of stances, diagrams of chakra, all drawn as small as they could be and still be legible.

Hinata could scarcely believe that she held one of only two scrolls that held instructions for the Dim Mak. The Jyuuken was lethal enough, designed as it was to target the soft innards of a human being, yet the Dim Mak was a step above and beyond the Jyuuken. Jyuuken was unique among martial arts styles in the fact that it was based on the manipulation of chakra. Many styles used chakra in one form or another, to either strengthen or speed up the body, but none were based on the use of chakra. And even then, the Jyuuken totally eschewed any sort of elemental manipulation, relying completely on inert, neutral chakra. Some styles imitated one element or another, for example Maito Gai's Strong Fist was based on hard, fast strikes, much like earth techniques, even if it did not actually used earth-natured chakra, or the Uchiha's Intercepting Fist, mostly reactive to play to the strengths of the Sharingan, resembled water techniques.

While the Jyuuken was unique in its use of neutral chakra, the Dim Mak was equally unique in its use of Yin chakra exclusively.

The first exercise on the scroll was on how to master Yin and Yang chakra. The concept of Yin and Yang chakra was a mostly cerebral one, in that Yin and Yang chakra, together, was what was generally referred to as neutral, inert, or non-elemental chakra. Yin and Yang chakra was the basis of all nin- and genjutsu. To use an architectural metaphor, Yin and Yang chakra could be compared to the foundation of a building. Every single building had a foundation of some sort, some more extensive than others, but the foundation was still there.

Transformation and Clone Techniques, medical techniques, as well as the Nara's and Akimichi's Secret Techniques could technically be classified as Yin-Yang Release, as the effects of the two techniques were created by altering the ratios of Yin to Yang. That was easy enough, as the ranking of most non-elemental jutsu proved. But separating them? It was like trying to remove creamer from coffee: impossible. One could add more coffee or more creamer, but removing one from the other simply could not be done. Still, Hinata persevered, mediating like the scroll told her to, trying to do just that. She dared not skip this, the scroll was explicit on that point. The ability to divide Yin and Yang chakra was essential to the Dim Mak.

OoOoO

Tsunade had known that it was only a matter of time, but that did not mean that when Danzo stepped into her office, she was pleased to see him. She barely batted an eye when Koharu and Homura followed Danzo into the room. She had not expected those two to appear, but it was not much of a surprise either. Despite Danzo and Hiruzen's enmity, the Sandaime's former teammates were sometime allies of Danzo's.

Tsunade gave each a polite nod, which was returned and gestured for them to take their seats. Koharu and Homura did, while Danzo remained standing. "You have made a grave error Tsunade."

"Really," the Hokage drawled in reply. "I know that I am growing old and feeble, so if you could perhaps refresh my memory for me?"

Danzo scowled. "Do not play the fool. It does not suit you. You know exactly what I am talking about."

"I honestly do not, Danzo."

"The Uzumaki boy. He was sent out of the village on a high-risk and long term mission. He must be recalled immediately."

"Oh, the Eyes-only, Top secret, A-rank mission he was assigned. The mission that you are not supposed to know about?" Tsunade was not wearing her official robes, nor her hat of office, but it was clear from her posture, back straight, hands folded on the desk and eyes slightly narrowed, that she did not need them to prove her authority.

"Precisely," Danzo replied without losing a beat. "I suppose it should be expected, and I can sympathize with him, and his goals are admirable, but you have to realize that he is on a fool's errand."

"No Danzo, I do not."

Danzo pursed his lips in irritation. "Tsunade, that boy is out ace-in-the-hole, our weapon of last resort. Sending him out into enemy territory without any protection is..."

"Watch how you finish that sentence Danzo. Do I need to remind you that you stand in front of your Hokage. I appreciate your concern, even if you should not know anything to be concerned about in the first place, but it is misplaced. He is stronger than you might think, and has Jiraiya escorting him."

"Be that as it may, your former teammate is only one man. Can he take on the whole of Iwagakure, or Kumogakure should things take a turn for the worse, assuming he even makes it that far? His identity has been a closely-held secret for good reasons, but he does bear an unmistakable resemblance to his father."

"Tsunade, you must realize that the boy is completely unsuited for such a task in the first place. He has no diplomatic training, and given his... propensity for rash action, do you think that he could behave in a manner that would be required of him?" It had been agreed beforehand that Danzo would be allowed to lead the three of them against the Hokage, but Homura and Koharu would speak up when Tsunade denied Danzo. "He is going to have to interact with heads of state, and village leaders," Homura continued. "Or is Jiraiya planning to act for the boy?"

"And that is completely disregarding the extremely high chance that he would be denied entrance into the Lands of Stone or Lightning." Koharu had taken her seat on the other side of Danzo from Homura, adopting a nearly identical posture. "And that would be the best of all options. I cannot imagine what we would do if he were to be taken captive. Kumo already has the Two- and Eight-Tails. Adding the Nine-Tails to them, they would be the undisputed strongest village. We only maintain our position by a narrow margin, relying on the reputations of our S-class nin, such as yourself and Jiraiya-kun, and our more famous jounin, such as the Sandaime's son, Kakashi and Gai."

Koharu was cut off by the sharp crack of Tsunade's palm slapping down on the polished surface of her desk. There was nothing gentle in the glare that she directed at the three elders. "I appreciate your concern for Naruto, but you overstep yourselves. I remind you that you three are advisors, nothing more. I will call on you when I wish to hear your opinion, and only then. Danzo, I realize that you are only doing this because you genuinely believe that I am wrong, but do not mistake me for the Sandaime. You have provided valuable and irreplaceable service in the past, but I will not tolerate your interference. I will not tell you to stop having my office watched, but I will tell you to not do anything that would force me to move against you, and that includes sending any of your off-the-books ninja after Naruto. You and your organization belong in the shadows where you can do the most good, and I hope that you will not make me pull you from them. Trust me when I say that you would quickly wither in the light. Come to me in this manner again and I will destroy you."

Danzo stared at Tsunade for a few seconds before nodding his head in acquiescence. "You aren't going to tell me to stay away from my former soldiers?"

"No. For one, I know you would disobey me behind my back, so I will not bother. Unlike my predecessor, I do see the value in having a force that cannot be proven to exist." Danzo gave another nod. "But do not think that means you can do as you please with them. If I have the slightest suspicion that you might be using Root in any way that I would disapprove of, I will not hesitate to eradicate you both. Clear?"

"Perfectly, Hokage-sama."

"That said, I want a full report on Root. Do not say anything Danzo. I want to know about personnel, materiel, mission capability, et cetera. Naruto is out there trying to create an organization to counter Akatsuki. But in order to do that, he will need the full support of Konoha behind him. And that includes Root. So you will give me a complete report on the status and capability of Root when I want it. I will not tolerate independent factions of Konoha shinobi operating within this village without my knowledge and direction. You will be used by me or I will see you destroyed."

For the first time in what seemed to be decades, Danzo smiled. Not a cat-got-the-mouse-smile, but a smile of actual pleasure. "Of course, Hokage-sama. I have always held the well-being of Konoha to be my utmost priority. Half the reason why I formed Root was to protect Konoha. I am but a weapon to be used for the protection of Konoha." Bowing from the waist, Danzo asked, "is there anything else, Hokage-sama? There is much I must do if the report is to be ready when you want it."

OoOoO


	3. Waiting

**Chapter Three: Waiting**

**A/N: Exposition heavy, more world building. See ending AN.**

**For those who might have (understandably) forgotten, Urashima Military City is the capital of the Fire Country.**

Naruto woke up the morning after his and Jiraiya's meeting with the the Fire Daimyo's majordomo in a bad mood. It was September 25th, and he had ten days to wait before he would be able to see the Daimyo. Ten days, with nothing to do but twiddle his thumbs. Just the thought of having to wait that long already had him antsy. Naruto was capable of being patient, as long as it was to a purpose. This however, seemed utterly pointless, and mean spirited besides. He was sure the wait was the majordomo's way of exerting his bureaucratic control over him, and while there were many things he hated, having to obey pointless orders was definitely in the top ten.

He threw his covers aside and sat up. Rubbing his eyes to clear them of the sleepies, he swung his feet over the side of the bed and rose. His room had a small bathroom attached, barely large enough to hold the sink, toilet and cubicle shower. He showered, brushed his teeth, changed into his freshly laundered blue army uniform, draping his coat over his shoulder, dropping his dirty laundry in the basket and went downstairs to the common room for breakfast. It only took a single quick scan of the room to find where the rest of his team was sitting. Three figures he expected to see were seated across from two he had not. Jiraiya, Hinata and Tenten were seated at a table on the far side of the room, near a cold hearth, with his mother and Asuma sitting on the other side. Both were dressed, but neither in their usual attire. Like Jiraiya, Hinata, Tenten and himself, they both wore the blue formal dress uniforms, but Anko had a pair of red squares on her shoulders, while a stylized tongue of flame rode on Asuma's shoulderboards, not dissimilar to the one on the door of the inn.

"Mom, Asuma-sensei, what are you two doing here?"

"Much the same that you are, I would assume. The Daimyo requested a sealing expert from Konoha, and I was sent. Asuma is here to baby-sit me."

Naruto cocked an eyebrow at that. "Hey, I am the one who taught you sealing, at least at first, remember?"

"That isn't what I was thinking. I am just surprised that the Hokage herself didn't come to make sure you stay out of trouble. And you know exactly what I mean, Mom."

Anko scowled. "You know, I am starting to wonder what the hell I did to get this kind of reaction from everyone. I mean I have never terrorized any civilians, never destroyed any privately owned property, never destroyed a bar on a drunken binge or kept the neighbors up all night or anything! And don't mention that time you got mugged either. That was a one-off."

"Well, what about that other time with Kakashi-sensei? You didn't get up until dinner."

"Again, that was. One. Time. One. Time. Never happened again, never will. 'Sides, that was halfway your fault in the first place."

"Nuh uh. No way you are pinning that one on me. You started it when you put freaking explosive seals on the ramen cupboard. We had to get a new refrigerator."

"Yeah, well, you learned your lesson about trying to sneak anything past me, didn't you?"

"Only because, well you know, _you put explosive seals on the ramen cupboard! _Seals, as in plural." That resulted in several raised eyebrows.

Fortunately for everyone involved, the common room was mostly empty, and what patrons there were were smart enough to pretend nothing was happening.

"They always like this?" Asuma asked.

"No," Tenten said. "They are usually worse." This time it was Asuma that cocked the eyebrow.

"No punches thrown, no furniture broken. Yet," Hinata said by way of explanation.

"Ah. You know, this explains so much that it is not even funny."

"Don't worry, you get used to it after a while." There was a thump, as mother and son engaged in fisticuffs, Anko almost pinning Naruto with a headlock, Naruto somehow managing to twist an arm back, up and around to grab a fistful of Anko's hair.

"Uh, you sure we shouldn't be doing anything?" Asuma asked again.

"Not yet. Wait for it, wait for it. There. Now you can." A pause. "It is going to have to be one of you two, because neither Tenten nor I are strong enough to do it." By now, Naruto had wriggled out of Anko's headlock and was gnawing on her forearm, while Anko was slamming her elbow into the back of his head over and over.

With a put-upon sigh, Jiraiya pushed his end of the bench back and moved to separate the pair. Jiraiya was a big man, so he was able to pull the brawling duo apart without much effort. "So what are all you doing here? I'm not too surprised to see Jiraiya and Naruto here, but what is with you two?" Anko pointed at the two genin.

"It is a little complicated," Tenten answered.

"I have barely been gone a month, how much could have happened?" A pause, traded glances. "Seriously? What the hell happened?"

"The short version is Sasuke tried to go rogue a couple of days after you left, Hinata, Tenten, Shikamaru, Neji and I brought him back, got apprenticed to to the pervert for real this time and am trying to get permission to leave the country to unite the other Jinchuuriki against Akatsuki."

"Damn, someone has been a busy little beaver." Naruto just shrugged. "I assume you know your chances."

Naruto released an aggrieved sigh. "As everyone is prone to telling me, yes, I know it is a long shot. But the way I figure it, the hardest part will be getting everyone to the table. Once I get everyone to just meet, half the battle is already won."

"Well, you are already pretty friendly with the Mist Jinchuuriki, one of them at least. Do you have a plan to get the Stone and Cloud Jinchuuriki to the table?"

"I will figure something out when I get to that point."

"Right, this is my son we are talking about here. Well, I suppose that is as good a plan as any."

"Unless you have a better one? Everyone else seems to."

"Hey, don't get snippy with me."

"Sorry."

"Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you. I am sure you have been told how hard it is going to be, so I won't say anything further on that subject. I just hope that you won't be too disappointed if everything doesn't go to plan." Anko put her hands up in surrender at Naruto's look. "Okay, okay, I'm done."

Breakfast arrived then and conversation ceased for the next few minutes. Anko and Asuma waved goodbye and departed soon after. The serving girl was collecting their plates and utensils as Jiraiya addressed his pupils. "Well, we have ten days until Naruto and I have to meet the Daimyo so why don't we get started with your training?"

"Actually, I was hoping that we could have the day off today," Naruto said.

"What for," Jiraiya asked back.

"Personal time," Naruto replied, jaw already thrust out in preparation for a fight.

"There is-"

"Listen, Ero-sennin, the we haven't had a break in months. First it was the mission to Grass, then it was the Chunin Exams, then it was the invasion, then we had to go get Sasuke back. I haven't been on a date with either of my girls in far too long. So we are going to take today off, put off work and training for twenty-four hours and do something for us. The world isn't going to end, and there is nothing you can teach that cannot wait for tomorrow."

"Would you can it for a moment? I was going to say,you could take them to see the new Fuun-hime movie that just came out. You know, a dinner and a movie thing. But if you have a better idea..."

Now it was Naruto's turn to frown. "You mean you don't care?"

Jiraiya giggled. "Hey kid, I ain't your mother, and it is not place to deny true love. 'Sides, still got over a week till we can even find out if we can get out of here. And like ya said, I don't have anything to teach you that can't wait."

"Well, good." Naruto gave a sharp nod. He clearly had been expecting more resistance, and clearly had set himself to argue. Offering an arm to Tenten and Hinata, the trio departed the inn. Naruto did not have any particular destination in mind, but the girls did not mind. They wandered the streets, taking turns more or less at random when one of the three saw something that piqued their interest. Eventually, the threesome found themselves in a bazaar in the commercial district.

The clamor was astounding, merchants manning stalls claiming that his meat pies were made of the freshest meat, the hottest sauces. Her jewelry was made of the highest quality, flawless stones. Their knives would never dull, and could even cut through the toughest grist and bone with unparalleled ease.

Naruto, Hinata and Tenten wandered through the bustling crowd in a little pocket of clear space, the crowd parting around the three, almost as if by happenstance. And they were not the only ones to receive such treatment. Patrolling soldiers were made way for, but the occasional monk, both proper Shinto kannushi and informal spiritualists, and men wearing dark, close-fitting robes, a small square of white showing at the throat traveled in pockets as well. The robed men wore odd blades on their hips, cruciform and straight, rather than the more traditional katanas that most swordsmen used. Both the black robed men and the monk carried themselves as important men, and even patrolling soldier made way from them. Seeing the nominal keepers of the peace make way for the two groups, Team Nine did so as well. None of the three knew anything about the black- and blue-robed men, but Naruto did not want to risk a confrontation with anyone the Daimyo might hold favor with, and given that the military police seemed to defer to them, it seemed to be a logical conclusion that both groups possessed some measure of authority.

In any case, the trio made their way through the bazaar without incident, and the rest of the day as well. They managed to find their way back to the inn after only having to stop for directions twice, just in time for dinner. As had been said before, Urashima Military City was on the order of magnitudes larger and more populous than Konoha even had the potential to be. Normally, a day on his feet wouldn't have caused Naruto to break a sweat, but between the crowds, the sights and sounds, new foods to try and people to see, Naruto found himself exhausted. Not the bone-deep weariness that came after an injury, or channeling the Kyuubi's chakra, just a tiredness that a good night's sleep would cure.

The three adults said nothing as Tenten and Hinata, much in the same condition as Naruto wandered off to bed soon after dinner.

OoOoO

Naruto woke in his room the next morning, took a shower, got dressed and ate breakfast, much as he had the previous morning. It was not precisely early, but nor was it very late in the morning, so when Jiraiya reported that both Anko and Asuma had already left for the Black City.

"I wonder how long they are going to be here," he asked nobody in particular as he ate a bowl of rice.

"Probably longer than we are, should things go according to plan. It isn't often that the Daimyo requests someone from Konoha for a sealing job. The samurai have several experts in the field themselves, so when he does, it is usually for a big job."

"Then how come you weren't sent?"

"Kid, I am one of... oh, probably top five or so sealing adepts in the world. As you know, you pay for what you get. I rarely get called out for a sealing job, as my expertise is usually prohibitively expensive."

"Like how expensive?"

Jiraiya chuckled. "You wouldn't break the bank, but most smaller countries would have to dig deep. Generally speaking, anything under S-rank can get handed off to someone else."

Naruto looked skeptical. "Kid, have you seen what we charge for S-rank missions?"

"No," Naruto said slowly.

"Ten million is the absolute lowest. Twelve or thirteen is more usual. Although, at the same time, most S-rank missions are run for Konoha itself, so there is that as well.

"Damn." Even Tenten and Hinata looked a little impressed.

"S-rank missions have to be very profitable, because by their nature they are incredibly dangerous, in more ways than one. The chance of losing some of your most skilled ninja is very high, as are the potential repercussions should the mission be blown. Ninja are expensive, for damn good reasons. And we like it that way. Just about the only missions that your average Joe can afford are D-ranks, and those are only offered in the villages themselves. Every time a ninja leaves the village, there is a chance that he or she is not coming back, and ninja are not cheap to train, both in time and resources." Finishing his tea in one last gulp, Jiraiya smacked his lips and sighed. "You ready to begin training then?"

"Ah," was as far as Naruto got before Jiraiya broke in.

"Naruto, when I accepted you as my apprentice, you said that you would do everything and anything that I required of you. I gave you yesterday off, as I know you haven't had much time off recently, but you cannot keep slacking. Did I make a mistake in taking you as my apprentice?"

"Ah, no," Naruto was quick to say. "Just the morning. There is something that I want to do. Won't last past lunch, I swear."

Jiraiya narrowed his eyes in suspicion, but relented. "Until lunch then." He left without another word.

"Naruto-kun?" Hinata asked, speaking for the first time since she and Tenten had come down to the common room.

"Don't worry. He'll be fine. Probably."

"If you say so," Tenten replied, suppressing a smile. "So what is it you wanted to do?"

"Wait until we get to my room."

"Your room? Your aren't planning anything... perverted are you?" Tenten said.

"Because you know that nooners aren't healthy," Hinata innocently.

"Arg, I am not taking you two up-" He paused, peering at the two suspiciously. "Who said nooners aren't healthy?"

"People," the pair chorused.

"You two are spending way too much time together. And stop ganging up on me."

"Says the one who can make a thousand shadow clones without breaking a sweat."

"She has a point," Hinata agreed. "I mean, it isn't like you couldn't summon a couple of shadow clones and kidnap us to ravish us into unconsciousness whenever you like."

"But then again, what would your mother think? Abducting two innocent girls to hide away in some tower that only you can get into, for your nefarious schemes."

"Way, way, way too much time together. And my mother. And Jiraiya too, for that matter."

This caused Hinata and Tenten to break out in giggles. Still moving more or less in tandem, they leaned over to Naruto and planted a kiss on each cheek. "Don't worry, Naruto-kun. We know you wouldn't do anything to hurt us."

"Unless we wanted you to."

Naruto just let his head fall to his crossed arms. Sitting back up suddenly, he summoned a shadow clone and threw Hinata and Tenten over a shoulder, hurrying back up the stairs.

The common room remained silent for several seconds afterwards. "You don't think he is really going to take them up to his room to ravish them into unconsciousness, do you?"

"Probably not," Benji said. "He is only thirteen you know." Still everyone stared up at the stairs for several seconds after that.

OoOoO

"Ravishing time?" Tenten asked once they were alone.

"Okay, you know that if you keep that up, I will start to think that you want me to."

"Who says we don't?"

Naruto really did not know how to reply to that. "Alright, if we can cut the sexual innuendo for a moment, I will tell you why I brought you up here."

Sitting up straight, Hinata and Tenten dropped their smiles and gave Naruto their serious attention. "We are listening, Naruto-kun," Hinata said for the both of them.

"There is something I want the two of you to learn. The Rasengan."

"The Rasengan? That is an A-rank technique."Tenten's eyebrows had arched in surprise.

"Yeah, I know. And I want the two of you to start learning it. I know," he said, forestalling Tenten with an upraised hand, "it is a really high-level technique, and I don't expect either of you to learn it overnight, but I want you to start. Neither of you have a one-hit-kill technique, and Tenten, you really don't have any hand-to-hand techs. I want you to learn it so that you do have an ace-in-the-hole of sorts. You are both two of the strongest kunoichi I know, but I can't help but worry when you end up fighting without me. I worry, and I can't help it. Having the you at least working on the Rasengan won't make me worry less, but it would make me feel better."

"We will try, Naruto-kun. If it makes you feel better."

"It does," he assured Hinata. Tossing each woman a water balloon. "Stage one. Pop the water balloon." Hinata and Tenten both glanced at the water balloon, then back to Naruto.

"I assume we aren't allowed to poke it with a needle?"

Naruto gave Tenten a look and held his own water balloon in his left hand. In his right he created a Rasengan. Carefully channeling chakra into the water balloon in his left hand, he let the chakra go wild, releasing just enough chakra to make the balloon deform in a dozen different directions. "The first stage is learning to pop the water balloon by spinning the water inside it. The Rasengan training has three stages, first, to create the spin, second, to add power and third to add control. The trick is to spin the water in a whole bunch of directions at once. If you just spin it in one direction, like this," he said, demonstrating, "All it does is flatten out. But if you spin it a bunch of ways, then it pops," and did just that.

The kunoichi exchanged glances and set to. Of course, having already mastered the technique in question, Naruto was able to make it appear easier than it was. Given that the first stage was nothing but an extremely advanced chakra control exercise, Hinata was the first one to master it. The clock sitting on the bureau showed it was a little after one. Naruto had been doing his own training, holding a Rasengan in his right hand, and trying to form one in his left. In the Academy, his chakra control had been fairly bad, but between all the extra practice, learning new chakra exercises and the Rasengan, his control was well above average. Judging solely on the sheer difficulty of the technique, the Rasengan more than qualified for an A-ranking. Forming dual Rasengans wasn't quite on the level of elemental recombination, which was about as difficult as looking left and right at the same time, but it wasn't far short.

Forming a single Rasengan was a simple task now, requiring little more attention than any other technique, but the moment he drew his focus away to form a second one, the first started to destabilize. Naruto wasn't deterred in the least. Jiraiya could do it, and he would be able too. He just had to keep at it.

Both Hinata and Tenten were beginning to tire when Hinata finally managed to pop her balloon. Hinata jumped in her chair at the abrupt dousing, as well as Tenten, who got splashed as well. Nobody said anything for a moment, until Naruto laughed.

"Good job Hinata-chan," Naruto congratulated her, a wide grin curving Hinata's lips. Naruto let his Rasengan dissipate, rising to his feet. "Well, I can't say that I was expecting either of you to get it on the first day, but I am impressed. Anyways, I think this makes a good time to stop for lunch. What do you think?" he asked them both.

"A good idea," Tenten said, shaking her stinging palms. Hinata concurred, and the trio went down to the common room.

Naruto took Tenten's hands, gently massaging her aching digits as they descended the stairs. Naruto sat between the two women as they ate, giving each all of his attention. The common room was fuller than it had been at breakfast, somewhere between half and three-quarters full, few enough that each group could have a table or booth to themselves. Patrons consisted of the middle-of-the-road local shop owners and merchants, and slightly wealthier foreigners. The room was filled with a comfortable babble, not subdued, but not loud enough that one had to shout to be heard. There were a number of merchants conducting business, dipping fingers in wine and scribing figures on the worn polish of the tables. Nobody gave the teens a second glance as they seated themselves at a table near the kitchen. A few of the closer diners tugged a forelock or gave a careful nod, but no one made issue with the trio apparently getting the cooks priority.

Naruto pushed the bench back from the table as a serving girl swept by collecting their empty bowls and spoons. Naruto and Hinata headed toward the stairs following Jiraiya but Tenten didn't. "I am going to head out for a bit, Naruto-kun. I got an errand or two I need to run, before dinner."

Naruto glanced at Jiraiya, but he was already halfway up the steps.

"Need me to come?"

"No, I will be fine myself. Just need to talk to a couple people."

"When do you think you'll be back?"

"Not sure, but before dinner for sure."

"Alright then," Naruto said, perhaps a little more carefully than he had before. Tenten followed the pair up, retrieving her blue dress coat and her pistols. Naruto exchanged a glance with Hinata before creating a clone. The clone quickly vanished in a shimmer of chakra and tailed Tenten out of the inn. Had it been Hinata he had been tailing, the Camouflage Technique would have never worked, but like him, Tenten did not have any extra-sensory techniques in her repertoire. As long as he stayed to the roofs, there was little chance of Tenten discovering him.

Jiraiya was waiting for the pair in Naruto's room. "Where is Tenten?"

"Went to run some errands," Naruto said.

"Whatever. You can catch her up when she gets back. That actually brings me to my first point. One of the main areas I will be instructing you in is sealing, very advanced stuff that is only known to about a dozen others in the world. That obviously includes your Great Demon Binding Seal."

"My what?"

"The seal that the Kyuubi is held in."

"I thought that was called the Eight Trigrams Seal?"

"The Eight Trigrams Sealing _Style,_ yes. Combined with the Dead Demon Consuming Seal, it makes the Great Demon Binding Seal. The various Jinchuuriki seals use different methods to bind the Biju, from Sand's Hidden Oasis Sacrifice Possession, Waterfall's Crashing Thunder Seal and Cloud's Iron Armor Seal, the Great Demon Binding is... unique."

"How so?" Hinata asked, beating Naruto to the punch.

"For one, it only seals half of the Bijuu's chakra in the Jinchuuriki. Two, it constantly, deliberately leaks a small amount of the Bijuu's into the Jinchuuriki's circulatory system. This is unique because while all Bijuu sealing methods leak chakra, the Great Demon Binding Seal does so intentionally, and that means that the "flow" can be turned off, in certain circumstances."

"Hold on, I asked you about that after the invasion, and you said that you wouldn't do it!"

"No, you asked if I would seal away the Kyuubi, forever. Its chakra can be halted however, but it is a complicated technique, and need significant preparation to do so. Anyways, I seem to have gotten a little sidetracked. What I was going to say is that I will be teaching you about your seal, and right now the number of people who could replicate it is one: me. Teaching your women the knowledge necessary to subdue you, should it ever become necessary would be a good thing."

"I suppose so," Naruto agreed.

"No supposition about it. Facts are facts: I am well over the average age for a shinobi. I am old. I am not as fast, or as strong as I once was. When I pass on, you will be the only one with complete knowledge of your seal. Having someone else who can shut you down, if the worst should ever come to pass is not just a good idea, it is a smart idea. Leaving you with the only one with the "key" to your seal, so to speak, just invites disaster. So here is what is going to happen. Your women will attend our sealing lessons, even though much of what I am going to be teaching will be over their heads. At the same time, you will begin teaching them the basics. Tenten and Hinata are smart girls, they should be able to pick it up fairly quickly, at least in the beginning.

"Another reason why I want you to teach them is that you can never truly master anything, be it taijutsu, ninjutsu, or anything else, without teaching it yourself. Teaching makes you go over the basics again, making sure that _you _have everything exactly right before you pass it on."

"I see."

Jiraiya smirked. "Not yet. But you will."

OoOoO

The first stop Tenten made was a certain shop in the White City. While firearms were virtually unheard of among ninja, most able to move faster than a bullet, guns were far more dominant among the rest of the world, where the average person couldn't move faster than sight. Nevertheless, firearms were heavily regulated, moreso in the capital than other places. So it was not hard to find one of the two stores that sold guns and various accessories.

Her conversation with the ever-so-helpful corporal had given her several ideas, and not all just about her rifles. Officers seemed to carry their sidearms, some model of revolver, in hip holsters, much like she did. However, she had seen a number of civilians carrying pistols in some sort of shoulder harness. She received several looks as the bell over the door rang, announcing her entrance into what would have been a weapon's store in Konoha. Of course, as UMC was not a shinobi town, the selection was limited to various types of hunting knives and firearms. Tenten paused just inside the door, sweeping her gaze across the store and its patrons.

"Is there something I can help you with... Sergeant?" The man standing behind the glass-paned counter was not what most would expect out of the proprietor of a gun shop. Gangly was the word that came to mind when Tenten examined the owner. Five-ten or so, he looked to be maybe a hundred twenty pounds. His arms hung at his sides, slightly bowed, skin drawn tightly enough over his wrists and hands that the bones stuck out in knobs. Blue veins bulged over the back of his hands, long fingers looking more appropriate on a pianist.

"Yes, actually, I believe you can." Drawing one of her larger pistols from the holster, she laid it and her rifle down on the counter. "I am looking to... upgrade."

The owner glanced down at the guns. "Yes, I would imagine so. Do you have anything particular in mind?"

"Do you sell Model '73 repeating rifles and Moses Brothers Self-Defense Engine Frontier Model Bs?"

A slight smile. "Yes, I do. If you will give me just a moment?" The proprietor gave a shallow bow and stepped into a rear room. He reemerged just a minute later, carrying a rifle. He handed it to Tenten. She hefted the weapon, noting that it weighed a good bit less than the ones she was using. Snugging the butt tight against her shoulder, she peered down the barrel.

It was lighter than her current rifles, and quite a bit shorter. "Graduated rear sights, accurate to about two thousand yards, uses 38-40 caliber ammunition. Lever action, fifteen round tube mag." Tenten set the rifle down and accepted the pistol.

"Muzzle heavy," she noted.

"A bit, because of the long barrel. Uses 38-40 cal ammo as well, making them interchangeable with the rifles." Tenten nodded, and broke the gun. "Five round cylinder mag. I can sell you speed loaders for it, if you want."

"I would." She took off her belt and slipped the pistol holster off.

"Holsters come with the gun. Would you like shoulder or hip rigs?"

"Shoulder. Can I get one with two holsters, like one under each arm?"

"Sure thing. Anything else I can help you with?"

"What kind of customization do you do?"

"Well, just the standard stuff, scoping, changing the caliber, trigger tuning, that kind of thing. What do you want done."

"Can you inlay a pair of electrum plates, here and here?" she asked, describing the area of the frame where the hands held the rifle. "And on the inside of the muzzle?"

The owner paused and considered her request. "Electrum? That is that chakra metal stuff right?" Tenten nodded. "How long you planning to be in town?"

"Another week, at least."

"Give me two or three days, and I have it done. May take me some time to find someone who carries electrum, but I can do it."

"Good. I want two of the '73s and Frontier Model Bs, each."

"Very well. I will send someone to let you know when they are ready."

"I am staying at the Flame of the West, up by the Black City."

"Yes, I know of it. Who should I ask for?"

"Higurashi Tenten."

"Very well, Sergeant Higurashi." Tenten collected her equipment and left.

Hoisting her rifle higher up on her shoulder, she set out to the Black City. It had been a while since she had gotten some real target practice in, and now was a good opportunity to rectify that.

OoOoO

Naruto had long passed worried as the sun set behind the high walls of the city. Tenten had set out hours ago, and should have been back well before now. He supposed that she just could have gotten caught up in something, but he didn't know, and that had him worried. His shadow clone had somehow been discovered up on the roofs tailing Tenten rather quickly, and dispersed in the resulting tussle. He had noted that his shadow clones seemed to have judgment and self-control issues, and this was one hell of a time for their... belligerence to crop up.

Had he been anywhere other than Urashima Military City, he would have blitzed the area with shadow clones until she turned up, but that was not allowed. Jiraiya had never said what the punishment for breaking cover, as it were, but swarming the city with five thousand copies of himself was liable to cause some issues with the authorities.

Benji the innkeeper sent several of his runner boys out to see if they couldn't find word of her. Jiraiya did the same, contacting his informants within the civilian and military police to see if anyone had reported any disturbances within the city. Tenten was no slouch when it came to close-quarters combat, but at the same time, it was far from her strong suit. Given her ties to Naruto, it was possible that she had been kidnapped, but by Akatsuki or some other agency, at this point didn't matter. Unfortunately, had she been kidnapped, Akatsuki was the likeliest suspect, as Naruto had not had the time to make many enemies outside of Konoha.

Such worrying proved to be unwarranted, however. "You mean she is in here?" Naruto asked several hours after dark had fallen.

"Yeah. But don't worry, it shouldn't be too difficult to get her out."

"Still, what is she doing here in the first place?"

"Naruto does have a point," Hinata added. "It isn't like her to do anything that would get her brought here."

"I am sure she has a good explanation for it," Jiraiya said. Neither Naruto or Hinata said anything as they waited in the lobby for Jiraiya to return with the third member of their team.

Naruto enfolded Tenten in a hug when she passed through the glass-paned double doors, looking a little more worn than she had when he had last seen her. She had a swollen lip and her hair was down. He waited until she pulled back before asking the question that was on everyone's minds. "What in the world did you do to get thrown in jail?"

"Not my fault," she protested immediately. "It was that dick sergeant that started the whole damn thing." Naruto cocked an eyebrow. "Bastard insulted my guns." Naruto nodded sagely, face carefully neutral as they walked out the jail, an arm thrown across Tenten's shoulders. "And he so had it coming. I mean, he accused me of cheating!"

"Well, we are ninja," Hinata pointed out.

"That doesn't mean that he can be crappy shot and then blame it on me."

"Okay, I think this needs some background. The desk sergeant said you got into a brawl with a squad of MPs," Jiraiya said.

"It wasn't like I knew they were MPs," Tenten muttered, crossing her arms under her breasts.

"Why don't you start from the beginning?" Naruto asked.

"Fine," she huffed. "I was at a firing range in the Black City, doing some target practice, since I haven't really done any in a while, and this asshole basically picks a fight with me. He keeps running his mouth, so I challenge him to a shooting contest. I won, of course, but he says I cheated. So I hit him."

"Just like that, you hit him?"

Tenten blushed. "Well... I got mad and said that just because he had brains the size of his balls didn't mean that everyone else did, and that everyone else was as shitty a shot as he was."

Jiraiya whistled. "I am gonna have to remember that one. That is pretty good."

"And then?" Naruto asked, grinning.

"And then he said that he had better make sure I wasn't a guy pretending to be a girl, and groped me. That is when I hit him."

"Okay, now I want to hit him too."

Tenten giggled. "I don't think that would be a good idea. Getting thrown in jail would hardly endear you to the daimyo."

Naruto waved her off. "You kidding? That bastard grabbed your boobs. I am the only one who is allowed to do that."

"That's right," she replied with a smirk. Naruto smirked back and tightened his arm around her shoulders, pulling her in for a kiss.

"Not in the street," Jiraiya said sternly. "Wait until we get back to the inn before you start any monkey business."

"Pah! It isn't like there is anyone around."

"She just got out, you want to go back in with her for excessive PDA?"

"Coming from you, that sounds more than a little odd."

"Hey, I always wait until I am behind closed doors before I break out the mojo."

"Says the self-proclaimed super-pervert."

"Different matter entirely," Jiraiya stated airily.

"Right," Naruto stated flatly.

"How often do you see me making out in the street?"

"Never, because the only female companionship you can get charges by the hour."

The conversation continued in that vein during the trip back to the inn, neither Hinata nor Tenten interrupting the pair's banter. Although, for Hinata, who was on the opposite side of Jiraiya from Naruto, it was spent peeking around the large man at Naruto and Tenten, and thinking.

The quartet arrived back at the inn in good time, and headed to their individual rooms, and bed, shortly after. Jiraiya disappeared into his room immediately, Tenten pausing just long enough for a clone to accompany her into hers. Naruto lingered outside Hinata's to give her a long kiss goodnight. Naruto let go of Hinata and moved to head to his own room, but Hinata did not reciprocate.

"Don't go," she said quietly.

Naruto stepped in close again and wrapped his arms around her again. "Are you sure?"

Hinata did not say anything back, instead grabbing his shirt with one hand, opening the door with the other and pulling him inside. Naruto closed the door behind him, and shucked his coat, leaving it on the floor beside Hinata's. He picked her up, her legs wrapping around his waist and carried her over to the bed. He dropped her on the mattress, following her down, never breaking lip-lock.

He wasn't so absorbed in the kiss, in the feel of her lips and the heat of her mouth that he missed Hinata take his hand and draw it up under her shirt. "Are you sure?" he asked again, through the kiss.

"I need my husband, now," she muttered back.

Naruto paused though. "Hinata, hold on."

"No," she muttered back, kissing his neck.

"Hinata, I said hold on," saying it more forcefully, pushing her back. "What is wrong?"

"What do you mean, 'what is wrong'?"

"I mean, what is wrong. This isn't like you."

"What isn't like me?" she asked, suddenly sitting back and scowling. "Taking the initiative? Wanting to spend the night together with my husband?"

"I mean making a move so suddenly. Why is it that you only want to sleep together now?"

"Why don't you want to sleep with me?" she shot back. "I mean, you have been sharing a bed with Tenten for weeks now."

Naruto did not say anything for several seconds taken back by the apparent anger in Hinata's voice. "Is that what this is? I have been sleeping with Tenten but not you?" Hinata said nothing, blushing a little. "You know that she and I aren't _sleeping _sleeping together, right?"

"And how would I know that? It isn't like you tell me what you two do together."

Naruto wasn't quite sure what to say to that. "I always thought that is how you wanted it. I mean, neither of you seemed particularly interested in what I did with the other." He paused. "Do you want me to tell you what I do with Tenten?"

"No," Hinata replied instantly.

"Well, then I am not sure what to say. What do you want from me?" Naruto was honestly confused. Tenten and Hinata had always seemed perfectly content with how things were. He had never heard either of them complain about how he treated either of them. "Please, Hinata-chan, tell me what is wrong so I can correct it." However, that seemed to be the exact wrong thing to say.

And so he found himself standing out in the hall, after having gotten her door slammed in his face, his coat in one hand, utterly bewildered. "What the hell?" he wondered to himself. He heard a snickering, and looked down the hallway. Jiraiya was standing several feet away, with a too-straight face, apparently with a case of the hiccups. Naruto stared at the old general for several seconds.

Jiraiya couldn't help himself. It was just too damn funny. He burst out laughing, hunching over because he couldn't get his breath, forgetting to hold the glass cup behind his back. He shambled past Naruto, who made him laugh all the harder with the look on his face. Anko would bust a gut when she heard.

Wondering just _what the fuck _had happened, Naruto decided it was too late to worry about it and headed to bed.

OoOoO

Neji was in a bad mood. Not that that would have been of much note a couple of months earlier, but the last couple of months had been sort of... eventful. While he would never be described as 'bubbly' or 'cheerful' or 'outgoing,' like his teammates, he was no longer the dour, unpersonable near-recluse that he had been before. Gai, Lee and Ino had been willing to leave him be at first, guessing that he would be able to work through whatever had happened by himself, but after a third straight day of mostly monosyllabic conversations and an apparent unwillingness to talk to anyone, Team Gai, or more properly, Ino, decided to get to the bottom of what was bothering her teammate.

"Ino, I have neither the time not inclination to deal with your curiosity. I am fine, and there is somewhere I need to be. If you will let me go, you can bug me about nothing later."

"Well, that's an improvement right there. That must have been the longest thing you have said in days."

"It has not," Neji denied.

"Uh-oh, heading back toward monosyllabicity again. Fight it, Neji! Use your words!"

While Ino was often annoying, this was a whole new level of ridiculousness, even for her. As she had apparently just decided to irritate him, something that she was prone to doing on occasion, he just tried to walk around her. But she was not having it, simply matching his movements, even when he turned around. "Ino, go bother Gai or Lee. I do not have time to deal with your idiocy today."

"Today, or the last couple of days either, it would seem." Just as he was going to Jyuuken her into submission, Ino threw her hands together in the specialized handseal for the Mind-Body Switch, and the next thing he knew, Ino was in his head.

"Ino, I swear, if you do not get out of my head, _right this instant,_ I am going to Jyuuken you so that you won't be able to walk for a week."

"_Just a moment, I am looking around here."_ And she was. He could see various memories flash by his eyes, until Ino hit paydirt. Neji ground his teeth as Ino examined the memory, a recent one, in detail.

"_I see,"_ she said after a few seconds.

"Ino, stop speaking now."

"_Ah, don't worry. I am done anyways." _And with that, Ino released the technique and Neji regained control of his body.

"Ino," Neji began to growl.

"You can't really blame him, you know. Naruto probably just did not think about you when he made plans to leave the village."

"Nor did he even inform me he was leaving either. I had to find out from _Shikamaru_ of all people. I am his second, he could at least mention it to me when he is planning to leave the village for an extended period of time."

"Well, it isn't like he was born into one of the Clans like us. He probably still isn't used to thinking in those kinds of terms."

"Naruto-sama isn't a child. He cannot afford to just forget about things like that. He is the next head of the Hyuugas. It is his responsibility to think about those things."

"Why don't you just send him a letter or something?"

"If I knew where he was, I might. The Hokage is being close-lipped about it. Shikamaru too."

"Well, I supposed that presents a problem," Ino admitted. "Let's go look for Shikamaru. I can probably get Naruto's location out of him." Neji was not given an opportunity to resist, and was nearly frog-marched along Ino to find Shikamaru.

"Why would Shikamaru know where Naruto is?"

"Naruto is apparently doing something big, and I overheard him and Naruto talking about contacting him."

"Interesting." And it was. While Naruto rarely did anything small, the fact that the Hokage had apparently set Shikamaru as her and Naruto's go-between was a fact to remember.

Shikamaru knew trouble when he saw it. And Ino was _always _ trouble. Had been when they were kids, and in the Academy, and still was now they were ninja. The Nara boy made a smart about-face on sight of the blond woman, but not quickly enough to escape her sight. He seriously considered running for it, but she was faster than he was, and it was very difficult to hide from the Byakugan. Sending a quick prayer skyward, he turned to face the pair.

"Where is Naruto?" Ino asked without preamble.

Shikamaru's mouth was open to tell them he was on the way to see the Hokage, and snapped it shut. While the fact that Naruto was on an extended mission out of the village was no secret, anything more specific was classified on a need-to-know basis. "I can't say," he said.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, his mission is probably classified, but you can at least tell Neji where to find him. He needs to send a letter to Naruto."

"There are a number of matters that Naruto-sama left unfinished before he departed. I need to contact him regarding several of them," Neji said somewhat stiffly, after Ino elbowed him.

"Still sounds weird to hear anyone call Naruto Naruto-sama." Shikamaru held his hands up to ward off Neji's frosty stare. "Sorry. Either of you talk to the Hokage about it? I really can't say without her permission."

"Come on, Shikamaru."

"And the fact that I don't know where he is either."

"You know, you could have said 'I don't know' at first."

"Would you have believed me?

Ino considered that. "Probably not."

"Well there you go. Now, I gotta go."

"Alright. Next stop, Hokage's Tower."

OoOoO

"No."

"Really?"

"No."

"You won't even contact him for us?"

"Naruto is currently out of communication. He will contact the village when he can. Until then, he is on his own."

"Damn." Ino shrugged. "Sorry Neji. I did what I could."

"You make it sound like I asked for you help."

"Well, you have to admit, you couldn't really have expected me to mind my own business when you were acting all mopey."

Neji opened his mouth to retort, but thought better of it, and left.

"Drat. I hadn't expected him to just walk out."

Tsunade cocked an eyebrow. "You mean you were deliberately antagonizing him?"

"Well, it is either that, or bowl haircuts and spandex."

The other woman chuckled. "I can't say that anything that keeps the number of Green Beasts down is strictly bad."

"My reasoning too. Now, I am going to see if I can't find him before he gets back to his place and bug him to buy me some pudding."

"Don't you have your own money?"

"I do, but it is more fun to spend his. Besides, it isn't like he is short on it."

"Whatever," Tsunade said chuckling and waving a hand in dismissal. "Just get out of here."

OoOoO

**A/N: **God, what has it been, almost six months now? Here go the obligatory explanations: real life kinda got in the way. I got into college, broke up with my girlfriend and moved twice. Plus, I just had absolutely zero motivation for this chapter for some reason. I knew where I wanted it to go, but getting it there was like pulling teeth.

I have no doubt that I have lost a great many readers, but I thank those of you who have stuck with this so far. I have most of the next chapter planned out, and while I won't give a deadline (they make the weirdest sound as they go rushing by,) it should be out in the next week or two. Certainly without another six-month hiatus.

Still not completely satisfied with this chapter, but if I hold on to it any longer, I may never post it. Tried to get some world-building and character development in. Not sure how successful I was on either counts.

Next chapter: Naruto meets the Daimyo and receives quite the surprise.


	4. Meeting with Might

**Chapter Four: Meeting with Might**

More than a week passed in Urashima Military City with surprising swiftness for the teenage soldiers. September passed into October, and soon it was the 10th. This particular date could not have come quickly enough for Naruto, but once it had arrived, he greeted it with great enthusiasm. He was not quivering in place, nor bounding with unrestrained energy, but he bore a grin that had to make his face ache.

"I don't suppose that I have to ask if you are ready to go?" Jiraiya had poked his head into Naruto's room to see if he was ready and saw Naruto, fully dressed, boots polished to mirror brightness, the creases in his coat and pants sharp enough to cut. Even the worn leather baldric that his blade hung from had been rubbed with oil, until the working stood out in stark relief.

Naruto gave Jiraiya a look that told him where he could put that and pushed his way past the old man and out into the hall after he grabbed his trenchcoat. Hinata, who was _finally_ talking to him again, even if he still didn't know what he had done to make her mad in the first place, and Tenten were already waiting in the commonroom, blades at hips, and in Tenten's case, guns as well. Tenten wore her long-barreled Moses Brothers pistols on low-slung hip holsters. She had originally tried to carry them in a shoulder rig, but the barrels were so long that they did not fit well under her coat, and were awkward to draw besides. That meant that her sword had been moved to her back, a new sword belt slung from right shoulder to left hip.

The two women wore their Uzumaki-crested black trenchcoats as well, Tenten's slitted just below the nape of her neck to allow her to wear her blade under her coat and the four ninja in disguise quickly left the inn.

As they walked, Jiraiya spoke. "Now, I know that I have already instructed you on how to behave in the Daimyo's presence, but we will go over everything once more. When we arrive, we will only be one of any number of petitioners waiting to see the Daimyo. It is unlikely that we will be seen to first, so we may have to wait for some time. When we are allowed to address the Daimyo everyone will come forward, but Hinata and Tenten just a little behind Naruto and me. The Daimyo is to be addressed as either sire, or my lord, at all times. Everyone will go to their knees when he enters, and only rise once he is seated. Once we have been called on to address the Daimyo, I will introduce Naruto, and he will make his case. There is a chance that he will call on either Hinata or Tenten, and should he, make your replies brief and to the point.

"There will also be representatives of the Church of the Jah, as well as the kannushi. Naruto, summarize what I have told you about both groups."

"Well, the Acolytes, as Church members are called, are a quasi-monotheistic religion that says that there is only one God, the Jah, and they are his chosen people. Members wear black cassocks, with a white collar, and wear straight, cruciform swords. They say that their God once came down from Heaven and took the form of a man, before he was killed, several thousand years before the beginning of the New Era. They are still waiting for his prophesied return, which will come at the end of time.

"They were also the first to seal the Bijuu away into inanimate objects, before we took their techniques and adapted them to create the Jinchuuriki. Their faith seems to give them some sort of power, a sort of resistance to the chakra of the Bijuu, and have unnatural luck. They can charge a line of riflemen and manage to be in the exact right place at the exact right time so they come through unscathed. They join their priesthood as teenagers, and do not leave their conclaves for twenty years. Every single one is a swordmaster, and are not to interacted with unless necessary.

"The kannushi are the Shinto priests, the monks in the ninja-samurai-monk trivium. They are superficially similar to the Acolytes, but bear some significant differences. They are closer to magicians than fighters, and can call the elements to their aid without the use of ninjutsu or handseals. They were the originators of sealing, as ninja use it, and it is rumored that they can create seals with a single gesture, using nothing but pure chakra to do so. There have been attempts to infiltrate their monasteries before, but whoever is sent in, soon comes back out, with no memory of what had occurred within.

"The kannushi are all older, as they recruit from the ranks of the samurai, and as they do, they are all skilled in swordplay, but spend most of their time studying whatever it is they study to do what they do.

"Both the Acolytes and the kannushi vie for influence with the Daimyo and possess considerable political clout within the court. The current Daimyo has favored the kannushi for most of his reign, but he seems to be favoring the Acolytes more of late."

"Good," Jiraiya said. "And exactly right. The Daimyo had been a steadfast supporter of the kannushi for the last twenty years or so, and nobody knows exactly what the Acolytes have done to gain his favor, and that makes a lot of people nervous. The Acolytes are not well loved among much of the court, and the last thing we want is the Acolytes to gain too much ground on the kannushi." After a meditative pause, he added, "they don't really like us ninja. Or rather, they don't trust us."

"Doesn't change anything though," Naruto stated.

"No, it doesn't," Jiraiya agreed. "In any case, just try to stay clear of either group, though each has their own agenda toward which they will try to influence the Daimyo. As long as you get permission to leave, you got what you came for. And don't be fooled. The Daimyo may appear to be an air-headed, fickle bureaucrat, but he is not."

It took another ten minutes to get to the Black City, and another twenty beyond that to arrive in the throne room. It was not nearly as large as any of the teenagers were expecting, maybe twenty-five meters square. The Red Throne was on a dais, raised five feet above the floor, with a set of stairs in the back for the Daimyo to ascend. The throne itself was not visible, hidden by a curtain. Directly behind the dais, was a narrow hallway, from which the Daimyo would emerge to climb the dais.

There were an number of other people there, perhaps two-score or so, in perhaps a dozen groups. The Daimyo had not arrived yet, of course, so that gave Naruto time to examine the architecture. Aside from the fact that everything was in the black volcanic rock that the mountain was made of, it greatly resembled pictures of the previous era's architecture that Naruto had seen, before the thousand year glows and death valleys. The room had a gabled roof, with stone pillars on each side of the room, connected by a broad stone beam, everything carved and worked to imitate wood. Between the pillars were small trees, sakura on the left, and tachibana on the right.

The petitioners were left waiting for approximately thirty minutes, before the double doors they had entered through slammed closed through no apparent mechanism. The sound barely had the chance to die out before two columns of people came around the dais, presumably from the hallway behind the throne. There were eight of them, what Naruto assumed to be the royal ministers and a man dressed in brilliant crimson and white and the blue and white of the kannushi. They arranged themselves to either side of the dais, with the two religious men closest to the dais, in opposite columns. A minute after that, the Daimyo himself arrived, the only sign of which was the shadow he cast on the curtain facing the petitioners, and the arrival of one last person. It was Werjau, the blond haired man that had dictated that they have to wait over a week to meet the Daimyo.

The blond man carried a sheaf of papers, and little else. At some unseen signal, everyone went to their knees, and the blond man's voice rang out over the chamber.

"On this tenth day of the tenth month, one-thousand nine-hundred, seventy-four years into the New Era, the one-thousand, nine-hundred, thirty-second year in the reign of the Emperor-Who-Was, I present Urashima Yamamoto, Third of His Name, Lord of the Land of Fire, Guardian of the Empire, Ever-Loyal Servant of the Emperor-Who-Was and the Emperor-To-Come." When the chamberlain fell silent, the curtain split in the middle, and the daimyo was seen. But, he was not seated in the throne placed in the center of the dais, instead, seated in a smaller, less ostentatious seat forward and to the right of the throne.

The Daimyo was a thin, fleshy man, with a large, hooked nose, strong chin and deep smile lines extending from his nose and curving around the ends of his mouth. His dark eyes and thin lips bore a small smile now and surveyed the petitioners with quick sweeps that missed nobody. His eyes flicked to the chamberlain and gave a small nod.

The next four hours were an exercise in boredom for Naruto. He listened somewhat attentively to the first two or three petitioners, but quickly became unable to muster even a cursory interest in the proceedings. Given that the samurai were the dominant force in the country, he had expected a little more warrior and a little less aristocrat in his nominal lord. Urashima seemed to be almost as bored as he was, at times, participating very little in the overall adjudication, declaring the party that convinced him the most the "winner." Oftentimes that meant that whoever made the last argument was the one that he decided in favor of. If Jiraiya's statement about the daimyo was true, he hid it well.

It was nearly two o'clock before Naruto was called to address the daimyo. Jiraiya and Naruto walked side-by-side in lockstep, trailed and flanked by Hinata and Tenten. All four went to one knee and rose at the chamberlain's signal. "My lord," Jiraiya said, "thank you for granting us an audience today. However, given the sensitive nature of subject of our request, I would ask that the chamber be cleared."

The Daimyo did nothing but flick his gaze to his seneschal, who then motioned for the guards to escort the other petitioners from the room. "The chamber has been cleared, Jiraiya," Werjau said in his mellifluous voice. "Now is the time to present your case."

"Of course, my lord, but I would defer to my companion, Captain Hyuuga Naruto, who is more directly involved with the subject of our request."

Urashima nodded, and motioned for Naruto to step up. Naruto cleared his throat, and gave the speech that he had been practicing for several days. "First of all, I would like to thank my lord for granting us an audience with your person, particularly given the gravity of what I wish to discuss. As I am sure you are aware, I am the the Jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi no Youko. As you are well aware, the balance of power between the nations of the world is often precarious, especially between the Jinchuuriki-holding nations, particularly given the recent Sand-Sound invasion. Each Jinchuuriki is the ace-in-the-hole for his or her country, and a threat to any one is a serious matter. The power of a Jinchuuriki is such that it requires another Jinchuuriki to counter. I say this not to patronize you, my lord, but to reinforce the seriousness of what I am about to say. My master, Jiraiya-sensei, has been tracking a group for some time now, calling itself Akatsuki, with the stated goal of abducting all nine Jinchuuriki, for purposes that are not clear. However, the mere fact that they have set their sights on we Jinchuuriki is cause enough for concern."

The Daimyo frowned, and the ministers and the guards all broke out in quiet murmurs. The Daimyo leaned back in his chair, heavy-lidded eyes drooping in either intense thought or sleep. But it was not Urashima that spoke, but rather the blond-haired Werjau again. "This is a serious allegation. How reliable is your source, Jiraiya?"

"Rock-solid, my lord. My agent is is placed in such a position that he could not be wrong."

"I see. Captain Hyuuga, you say that the Jinchuuriki are the aces-in-the-hole for each nation, and you are correct. But by that same logic, the Jinchuuriki are among the most protected individuals in the world. What makes you think that this group, this Akatsuki, has the strength, and the reach, to kidnap all nine? And what about its size? Any group hoping to attack the source of the Elemental Nations strength would have to be formidable in size. Large enough, at least, to have come to our attention before now."

"Not necessarily, my lord. According to Jiraiya-sensei's informant, there are only nine members of Akatsuki, and all the members we know of are S-rank shinobi."

Again, Naruto's words caused their audience to break out in murmurs. But not all were content to whisper among themselves. One of the ministers, clutching a medium-thick folder bearing a sword-and-flame seal stepped forward. "General Kyushu, other than your single informant, do you have any evidence to lend credence to your claim?"

"Given the nature of Akatsuki, and its members, I believe anything further would be stretching the bounds of reason."

"And can you list the members of this organization? If your informant is as well placed as you say he is, then you should at least be able to tell us why we should believe that this group can do what you say they can do."

"Zetsu, the Ghost. Sasori, of the Red Sands. The Mad Bomber, Deidara. Kakuzu, of Five Souls. Hidan, the Immortal. The Monster of the Hidden Mist, Kisame. Itachi Clan-killer. And the head of Akatsuki, who is merely called The Leader."

"You are saying that seven known S-rank missing-nin have banded together?" The minister was pale-faced, but was probably one of the more composed members of the court present. Several of the other ministers had bloodless faces, and even the daimyo seemed to be paying attention. "You have to be mistaken. There would be news if that many S-rank missing-nin..."

"It would be war," the daimyo said quietly, all pretense to idiocy or air-headedness abandoned in his gaze. "It wouldn't be a Fourth Shinobi War, it would be a hot war, one we have not seen in a hundred years or more. And if Jiraiya is telling the truth, should this group get all nine Bijuu, it would be a Fourth World War, with violence and death to compete with the one that ended the previous era." He paused, apparently cutting himself off before he said too much. "Jiraiya, why did you not bring this information to me sooner?"

"To be frank, my lord, because there is nothing you could do. As of now, you know everything I do about the group. I do not know of their recruiting procedures, what, if any support they have, finances, matériel, et cetera."

The daimyo frowned. "You said that you had an informant within the group. What of him?"

"Communication with my man is limited. The Leader, whoever he is, is extremely paranoid, and not without reason. He keep the members of his organization on short leashes and in the dark about his eventual goals. Keep in mind, the Ghost numbers among their members as well." The daimyo looked to his seneschal.

"I have nothing to corroborate or refute the General's claims, sire. But, if I may, at this point, it does not matter overmuch whether or not Kyushu-dono and Hyuuga-dono are correct in their claims. The fact that even the possibility of such an alliance between such highly-skilled criminals is great enough that any rumor of such must be investigated thoroughly."

"So noted," Urashima said calmly. "As for your request, I have yet to hear it."

Nodding to Naruto, Jiraiya stepped back and let the youth address the daimyo again. "I wish to leave the Fire Country for the purpose of recruiting the other Jinchuuriki into an organization to counter Akatsuki."

"Ridiculous," one of the heretofore silent members of the court interjected. As Jiraiya had warned, what was likely the Acolyte's representative had been the first to object, quickly echoed by his opposite in blue. "Your objective is understandable, but if Jiraiya-dono is to be believed, you cannot be allowed to leave the country. Uniting the other Jinchuuriki would be an achievement on any number of levels, but venturing beyond our borders, especially to Lightning and Rock would place you at intolerable risk."

"My counterpart, the Archbishop, is correct." The blue-robed man looked to be fighting his distaste in agreeing with the Acolyte, but agreed. "If we were Lightning or Mist or Rock, the possible loss of a Jinchuuriki could be lessened, but the loss of our sole Jinchuuriki would be an unmitigated disaster. Risks cannot be avoided entirely, but they can be minimized, and this is a completely unnecessary one. Emissaries can be sent, acting in proxy to at least inform the other Villages of the threat."

Naruto hesitated, hoping that the daimyo might intercede for him, but he merely leaned back, letting Naruto fend for himself. Drawing from his arguments with Tsunade, he said, "Akatsuki is a threat not to just us Jinchuuriki, but to everyone. Only an organization of Jinchuuriki, one counter to Akatsuki, could have the ability to fight them on an even playing field." Of course, the fact that both sides would be trying to make said field as uneven as possible went without saying, but the point stood. "The more Jinchuuriki Akatsuki gets its hands on, the harder it will be to stop them. Even one or two could be enough to tip the scale irreversibly in their favor. And to be frank, it would be impossible to expect any organization to function working solely through proxies. And that is assuming that my fellow Jinchuuriki would even agree to meet on the word of a non-Jinchuuriki.

"My traveling to Lightning and Rock is a risk, a large one, but one that must be made. The fact that I am willing to come to Lightning and Rock in person alone should be enough to get an audience at the very least." Naruto paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Basically, what I am trying to say is that we need to be able to trust each other, and if I do not go in person, that says that I do not trust, and it has failed before it has begun."

"Such eloquence from one so young," Urashima said airily. "And a compelling argument. But it does not change the fact that your are our only Jinchuuriki, and were you to be killed or captured, by Akatsuki or another village, your loss would be a serious blow against Konoha's strength."

"Everything you say is true, my lord, but I argue what will keeping me safe matter if the rest have all been killed or captured? Jiraiya said we don't know exactly what Akatsuki wants with the Bijuu, but it has to be for some type of weapon. The Kyuubi is the greatest of the Bijuu, but even it cannot stand against the lesser eight combined. Simply put, I am the only one who has a chance of defeating Akatsuki before they begin."

"Very well. You say you are the only one who can defeat Akatsuki? That may very well be true. At the same time, your kill or capture is something that must be considered as well. Therefore, I have a test for you." Urashima stood up, and took a step off the dais, taking the five-foot drop in stride. "I see you carry a blade at your side. I assume you know how to use it?"

"I do, my lord."

"Should you defeat me by blade, I will let you leave. Should I win, you shall remain within the country." Urashima untied the obi of his kimono and let the expensive garment fall to the floor of the chamber. Underneath, he proved that he was not all bureaucrat, narrow shoulders and chest wrapped in tough-looking, ropy muscle. His skin drooped somewhat loosely, evidence of a far more muscular build in his youth. The hilt of a katana was laid in his open palm by the seneschal, and Urashima wrapped his fingers and swung the sword in a series of absent-minded circles and rolls, useless in a fight, but showing casual familiarity with the blade and plenty of manual dexterity. "Is that acceptable to you?"

"Be careful," Jiraiya whispered into his ear. "Urashima is not the best swordsman around, but he is better than most. Do not let him sucker you." Naruto said nothing as the onlookers drew back, ministers and his team alike, some of the daimyo's retainers looking distinctly uneasy. He handed his baldric and scabbard off to Tenten, holding Kitsune loosely at his side. The daimyo offered him a shallow bow, which Naruto mirrored. There was no referee to declare the start of the match, so the pair simply stood, relaxed, neither making a move. Naruto did not bother testing his opposite's footwork, and simply went on the attack. Urashima's longer blade interposed itself between Naruto and the daimyo with scarcely a flicker of movement.

The attack had been a straight overhead cut, with a horizontal block. Naruto dragged his gladius along the length of Urashima's katana, and drew his sword in close as he spun around in a low cut aimed at the daimyo's kidneys. Again, Urashima blocked the blow, but not as effortlessly as he had the first time. A downward stab at his leg or foot was deflected to the side, as was a horizontal slash across his abdomen. Naruto was fast, one of the fastest ninja in Konoha, but Urashima was just as fast, and bigger and stronger besides. Urashima dodged Naruto's slash and stepped back. Naruto attacked again with a right-to-left diagonal cut that was blocked, turned it into a snaking thrust that Urashima danced away from, followed up with several high cuts designed to draw Urashima's guard high, and then dropped low with a thrust that would have hamstrung the older man, had it hit.

Another half-dozen missed or blocked attacks, and Naruto withdrew. Naruto was a strong fighter, but an average swordsman, and barring ninjutsu and taijutsu, he did not think he could beat Urashima. So sheathing his sword, he rolled the dice. He was a ninja, no matter what the unwritten rules said, and he thought that as long as he limited his ninjutsu, the chances of protest were acceptable.

Hands forming the seal to his signature technique, there was a dull _thoom_, and thirteen Naruto's rose from the smoke. Some of the peanut gallery muttered at the display of ninjutsu, but nobody interfered. Urashima took a fighting stance for the first time, in a high guard, his blade held above his head and gave a full-body flex, a burst of chakra bursting forth, churning chaotically around the samurai before calming down and settling into a stable chakra bubble, Urashima at the center. Naruto blinked at the odd stance, and gave a mental shrug at the chakra cloak. If he was going to use ninjutsu, he supposed the chakra cloak was fair game as well. However, it was clear that Urashima used the high guard for a reason, the downward circular sweep of his blade batting aside three attacks, sliding into a long thrust catching a clone in the guts that was coming in from an oblique angle. In fact, Urashima's entire style seemed to shift. Instead of stepping from block to strike, he seemed to... flow, instead of stopping attacks with hard blocks, Urashima deflected his cuts and thrusts, sometimes avoiding attacks entirely.

Several clones were de-sworded and de-armed by a deceptive little snaking thrust that Naruto could not keep track of. More than one lost his head to a weird looping cut that seemed to vanish and strike from nearly the opposite direction midstrike.

Naruto kept refreshing his clones, but Urashima seemed to be able to just barely keep ahead of him. It wasn't without cost to the daimyo, though. Naruto had yet to actually draw blood, but Urashima was sweating and the effort was starting to show. Three clones came at him at once, all three thrusting at once. Urashima danced away from the first two, and swatted the third's sword out of his hands and drove his blade into Three's chest to the hilt. Reversing his sword, a fourth clone was dispelled, turning the thrust into a wide-sweeping slash that was stopped cold by a pair of steel bracers. Urashima took a quick step and hooked a foot around the back of the Naruto clone's and upended him, the icepick-gripped short blade coming within an inch of his face. He was unable to take advantage of the upended clone when two more clones launched a third into the air. Urashima avoided the aerial attack easily enough, taking a single step back, enough to take him out of the range of the aerial clone's blade, and almost got upended himself when the launched clone immediately dropped into a footsweep, keeping him on the defensive as the two that had launched the third hopped over him, each swinging their swords in vertical downward strokes. He blocked both cuts with a horizontal block, letting the tip of his katana fall forcing his opponent's blades out of position as he slipped the other way, and then bisected one of the clones with a sliding slash.

The daimyo was good, very good, Naruto came to realize. He wasn't head and shoulders above Naruto in skill, but he was skilled enough that defeating him purely with bladework was an extremely iffy proposition. Urashima did not seem to have an issue with him using shadow clones to assist him, but were he to break out his full ninja arsenal, he doubted that he would stand for that.

At the beginning of the fight, Naruto knew that he would have to out-think the daimyo if he was as good as Jiraiya said, which he was and more. Naruto had taken advantage of the large cloud of billowing smoke his clones created to wrap himself in the Camouflage Technique, removing himself from the immediate fight, and giving him the ability to analyze Urashima's abilities without distraction. Letting his clones die, he dropped the invisibility jutsu as the last of the smoke dissipated.

"Giving up?" Urashima asked.

"Not yet. I still have one ace up my sleeve." Drawing Kitsune, he vocalized its activation phrase.

"Deaden, deafen, blind... FLASH! KITSUNE!" The words tumbled out of his mouth, sounding before he knew what he was saying. It was the first time that Naruto had actually used his zanpakuto's release command and it caught Naruto almost as off-guard as it did Urashima. Normally, his zanpakuto just sort of shimmered and flowed into its silver katana form, but this time, it released a burst of light, a rainbow corona emanating from the blade for a split second. He was on Urashima in a blink of an eye, trying to batter through the reeling daimyo's defenses, to no avail. Despite being nearly blinded by looking directly into the shifting sword, Urashima managed to keep his skin whole, relying almost entirely on instinct and training as he blinked to clear the purple and gold afterimage from his sight. But just as his sight returned to him completely, he swung his blade in a one-handed, straight overhead slash, the attack defeated by a horizontal block. He only had time to catch a glimpse of his distorted reflection in Naruto's silver blade when everything slewed to the right, nearly throwing him to the ground.

He tried to regain his balance, but it was a precarious thing, the ground wobbling beneath him as if it were balanced on a ball. The members of his court looked on in frozen fascination. No, that wasn't right. They were too still, too... flat, as if someone had replaced the people with cardboard cut-outs. The walls looked pretty normal, except that they were kind of hazy, as if he were looking at them through fogged glass. All this flashed through his mind in a split-second, as his attention returned to Naruto.

_'Genjutsu,' _he thought. _'He caught me with some kind of genjutsu... but he is not supposed to be able to use it...' _The thoughts passed sluggishly through his mind as he tried to focus on his opponent, but it was very difficult. Naruto was obscured by the same hazy indistinctness that the walls were, the only distinct thing about his was the vaguely fox-shaped shadow that loomed over him.

He backpedaled as fast as he could, barely staying on his feet, barely keeping ahead of that brilliantly silver sword. He blinked, an action that seemed to take a dozen times too long, and the hazy Naruto-figure vanished. He began to turn, pushing through air that felt like pudding, stumbling and barely catching himself an split-second before the silver katana would have buried itself in his throat.

Time seemed to lurch back into motion, but the onlookers remained frozen stunned disbelief. The next thing that Naruto heard was the scrape and swish of the royal guards polearms being brought to bear on him, and the rapid drumming of aforementioned guards boots carrying them towards Naruto. He backed off, sheathing his sword carefully and keeping his hands well in sight. Urashima waved his guards off, reluctantly obeyed. "I suppose that expecting you to follow the rules to the letter would be stupid. I was told that you can't use genjutsu."

"I don't. It is sort of a special ability I have. And it isn't like that I would limit myself to sword-work in a real fight in any case."

"Be that as it may you did break the rules. On the other hand, you did defeat me."

"So you will uphold your side of the bargain?"

"I will. Werjau, start getting the documents drawn up."

As the blond-haired man bowed and turned to speak to another man, the red robed Acolyte spoke up again. "My lord, I feel I must protest this entire sequence of events. Captain Hyuuga is a military asset of incalculable value. If you must allow this, then I must insist that the Acolytes be allowed to send a representative along with him. With respect to General Kyushu, the Acolytes are uniquely suited to dealing with Jinchuuriki, and would be able to prevent Captain Hyuuga to be able to be used against us."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Tenten asked suddenly, stepping forward. Jiraiya grabbed her shoulder, pulling her back, but she jerked her shoulder out of his grip.

"I am sorry, but who are you?"

"Higurashi Tenten. What did you mean by preventing Naruto-kun to be used against us?"

The Archbishop shot a sharp glance to Jiraiya, who pulled Tenten back, the girl reluctantly subsiding.

"No, hold on. I want to know what he meant by that also," Hinata said. "My name is Hyuuga Hinata, heiress to the Hyuuga Clan. I will demand an answer from you if I must."

"Hyuuga-dono, this is not the appropriate time to be making such inquiries."

"Hinata-chan, he is right. Whatever he means, we can get an explanation later. Let's just get this done with for now."

"I don't like it Naruto-kun," Hinata said, folding her arms over her chest.

"Me too," Tenten added. "Whatever he can do, it sounds like it is powerful. And I just do not like the idea of having a minder sent with us."

"Hinata-chan, Tenten-chan, don't worry about it now. We can figure out just what to do later. Later." The two women subsided at Naruto's look.

"The Acolytes are not the only ones who will be participating in this mission either. In addition, I will be sending a detachment of soldiers along with you Captain."

"Second Legion, 5th Regiment?" the sword-and-flame Minister said.

"Bad Company?" Urashima asked.

"I will notify the commander."

"Do so." Turning to Naruto, he spoke to him again. "Return tomorrow to collect your papers and escorts. They will be given orders yo safeguard your life above all. Other than that, they will be under your command, Captain."

"I cannot be coddled. I will have to visit Lightning and Rock at some point, and as long not prevent me from doing what I need to..."

"You will not be not be kept from entering Lighting and Rock, but if you do place yourself in needless danger, you will be prevented from doing so."

"Very well," Naruto said grudgingly.

"Return here tomorrow to meet your escorts and receive your papers."

OoOoO

It took Team Shinigami most of an hour to leave the Black City, and by then, all three teens were grateful to be out from under the oppressive weight of the Final Redoubt. "That was not nearly as hard as I was expecting," Naruto said cheerily.

"You got that right. Even I am surprised that the Daimyo let you go so quickly. I was anticipating much more resistance from more of the ministers then they gave."

"So we should probably head to Iron first. You said that you know the guy in charge?"

"Mifune, the Governor-General, yes. He is not particularly fond of shinobi, like all samurai, but he not as rabidly anti-ninja as some others are. I don't think that we should have much trouble convincing him to lend his support, as he is usually for international peace and cooperation and all that jazz. Creating a group of such disparate individuals would be a huge coup, in his eyes, so I see no reason why he would be opposed to helping us."

"Excellent. After that I think we should head to Sand, and then to Water, to meet with Gaara and Sora. I am pretty sure that Gaara would be willing to join, but I don't know so much about Sora. I have talked to her about other stuff, but never anything like this."

"Sounds like a good enough plan for now," Jiraiya said. "The real challenge will come when it is time to convince the Lightning and Earth Jinchuuriki to join, and finding the two exiled Jinchuuriki."

"Exiled Jinchuuriki?" Tenten asked. "That seems kind of risky, allowing a Jinchuuriki to defect from its village."

"I doubt that Mist or Rock was given much of a choice. Other than Naruto, all Jinchuuriki are trained from birth to be among the best shinobi of their village. Combine that with the raw power of the Bijuu itself, there is often very little a village can do if one decides to go rogue. As the Kageship of the ninja villages tends to be dynastic, Jinchuuriki are almost always chosen from close relatives of the reigning Kage, often from immediate family members. For example, Gaara is the son of the previous Kazekage, and the current host of the Eight-Tails is the current Raikage's brother."

"I would think that they would have some sort of way to make sure that they didn't go rogue though," Tenten said again.

"Not so much. It takes a long time to train a ninja, Jinchuuriki or not, and a certain level of trust is required. After all, Jinchuuriki are weapons, and if you cannot trust your most powerful weapon not to betray you, than it is worse than useless. That is why indoctrination is the favored method of controlling Jinchuuriki."

"Still, what if one does get out of control?"

"Then you either choose to fight, knowing that you are going to lose a lot of people, or let it go Hinata-chan. Mind-control and chakra suppression and other kinds of safeguards have been tried before, but no one has found an effective method of applying them. Just sealing a Bijuu is dangerous and delicate enough, without complicating it."

"Still, I think that someone would have found a way to do something after all this time."

"That kind of thing is a lot harder than you would think. I would think that you would have enough experience with that kind of thing to know better, Hinata-chan. Even delicately used, it tends to do more harm than good, long-term. The mind is extremely perceptive, when it needs to be, and usually does not take well to being dominated. Short term, it had have comparatively minor side effect, such as migraines and sometimes short term memory loss. Long term, it tends to turn the subject into a vegetable or rob them of all initiative, requiring instructions to do anything. Power limiters are better, but they tend to be unreliable at best. Too much strain on them can have nasty results."

"Is that what you really think?" Everyone turned to face Naruto. "Is that what you really think? That Jinchuuriki are so dangerous that we have to be brainwashed and leashed and controlled?" Naruto had fallen several paces behind the rest of the group, and had his fists clenched and brows lowered in anger.

"Naruto-kun, you know that you are different."

"Why am I different, Tenten-chan? Because you know me? Because we are engaged? Would you say that if you had never met me before?"

"Don't be childish, Naruto. You have been not been subjected to any of the training that most Jinchuuriki are given, but it does not change the fact that you are a Jinchuuriki. A tool is not demeaned by being put to the use that it was designed for."

"It is not necessary to abuse a tool to make it work. But you are right when you say that I have not been treated as badly as my fellow Jinchuuriki, but that does not make their abuses any less. We Jinchuuriki are feared because of our power, power that none of us chose, are punished for the circumstances under which we are born. It does not matter that I had never done anyone in the village physical harm, they hated me because I have the Kyuubi in me. But Anko loved me in spite of that, giving me a home, a life. She showed me that people were good as well, and if not for her, there could have been a very good chance that I would have hated this place. Love is always a better motivator than fear. Fear only works as long as the oppressed views the oppressor as invulnerable. As soon as the oppressor shows weakness, or the oppressed discovers their strength, fear fails."

"Naruto-kun..." Hinata started, but Naruto cut her off.

"Naruto-kun nothing. We Jinchuuriki are feared for the power we wield in the defense of our homes. We are hated for the very strength that is forced upon us upon at birth. Discrimination is never justified, no matter the reason. If you can't understand that, well, I guess you are not who I thought you were."

Both Hinata and Tenten called his name, but he ignored them, shoving his hands in his pockets and flash-stepping away.

OoOoO

"Want a smoke?"

"Wah!" Naruto was jerked from his reverie by the voice, tumbling several feet towards the edge of the red-tiled roof before he caught himself. A tile slipped and fell to the street below as Naruto righted himself and looked at Asuma. The bearded jounin's top half was sticking up over the side edge of the roof, his feet on the sill of the attic window that Naruto had used to climb up. Naruto scowled at Asuma as he pulled himself up onto the roof, sitting on the peak and fishing a pack of cigarettes out. He pinched one between his lips and held the pack out to Naruto. Naruto considered the pack for a minute before accepting one. Asuma put the pack away and struck a match, lighting both their smokes. They both took a drag, Asuma exhaling slowly, letting the smoke form abstract shaped in the still night air, Naruto kissing the cigarette and managing not to hack a lung up.

"Exhale before you take a drag to get it into your lungs properly. Try to hold it for a few seconds if you can." Naruto tried again, but this time taking too deep a drag and coughing, smoke dribbling out his nose and making his face screw up even more. "It is a bit of an acquired taste," Asuma said, "but you get used to it."

"One could wonder what kind of guy you are, offering cigarettes to a minor."

"Bah, old enough to kill, old enough to do all the rest. 'Sides, you looked like you could use one."

"Really," Naruto said, giving him a gimlet eye.

"Yeah. Heard you had a bit of a tiff with the others."

"You could say that."

"Want to say anything?"

"Not particularly," Naruto said. Asuma nodded and the pair listened to the sounds of the nighttime city.

"What do you think about Jinchuuriki?"

Asuma blinked at the sudden question. "What do you mean, 'what do I think?'"

"What do you think about the way that Jinchuuriki are treated?"

"Treated? Well, if they were anyone else, I would have to say it is pretty shitty. But Jinchuuriki are not normal people. Jinchuuriki are incredibly dangerous, as weapons who can turn on their allies if they lose control, and as potential missing-nin. Jinchuuriki have so much power that they really have to be controlled." Asuma paused to look at Naruto. He had drawn his knees up under his chin and wrapped his arms around his shins. "It may not be the most pleasant thing to hear, but it is true. If you were to ever lose control of the Kyuubi, you could kill a lot of people. The fact is, you contain a being on level with a natural disaster in you. I know that you did not choose to bear this burden, but you do not have much choice but to endure it. On the other hand, you do more to keep Konoha safe, by just existing, than most ever could hope to do. You have a mother and two women that love you very much, and I am sure that Anko, at the very least, would be willing to give her life up for you, and do it happily, were she given the choice. You may not have led a charmed life, Naruto-kun, but you are far from alone."

"I know I have had it pretty good compared to some of the rest, but that does not make it right."

"Maybe not, but life is not always fair. If it were, we would be out of work."

"Maybe," Naruto said quietly.

"Well, I am going back inside. Dinner should be ready by now, so come in when you want to." Asuma slipped back into the attic and left Naruto alone.

OoOoO

In retrospect, Tenten supposed she should have known that treatment of Jinchuuriki would have been a sensitive topic for Naruto, as she lay in the dark of their room, waiting for him to join her. Neither she nor Hinata had pursued Naruto after he had left, letting him have his space. Jiraiya let the two girls go once at the inn, instructing them to pack anything they had unpacked to be ready for the next morning. Tenten spent the rest of the time until dinner sitting on her bed alternating between practicing her Rasengan and staring at her engagement ring.

With Anko working late and Naruto avoiding everyone, dinner was a quiet affair, Jiraiya already knowing what was wrong, and not being able to do anything else, Asuma already having spoken with Naruto, and Anko busy with work. Hinata and Tenten went to their respective rooms afterwards. Tenten lay awake, on her side, staring at Naruto's unoccupied pillow. She wasn't sure exactly how much time passed, but the city had started to settle down for the night before Naruto entered the room. She said nothing as he pulled his shirt off and dropped it one the floor, and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his geta and pants. She remained silent as Naruto slipped underneath the covers, facing away from her and went to sleep.

It was clear that Naruto had been angered by some of the things that she and Hinata and Jiraiya had said about Jinchuuriki, but she had been honest. She was able to admit to herself that there was a little part of her that feared Naruto. She knew that he loved her, that he would never do anything to consciously harm her or Hinata or Anko, but she remembered how he had beaten Neji's face to hell during the Chunin Exams and had witnessed the aftermath of his rampage through the Sand and Sound shinobi that had invaded Konoha. Somewhere, in that dark corner of her mind, she wondered what would have happened had he really cut loose. She wanted to apologize to him, but was afraid of what he might say if he thought she was doing so insincerely. She wanted to reach out and have him wrap her in his arms, to rest her head against his chest and fall asleep listening to his heartbeat.

Sleep was a long time in coming.

OoOoO

Morning came quickly enough to Team Shinigami, and was quiet, as had the previous night. For once Naruto did not sit between Hinata and Tenten, an action that clearly had the two women in a state of unease. Anko came down after having been arrested by Jiraiya and informed of the situation, and left them be. Normally speaking, if it came down to picking sides in a serious argument, she would side with her son, at least until she heard compelling evidence that he was in the wrong. Unfortunately, in this case, there was no real right or wrong sides. It was only opinion, and after thinking about it, she found that she agreed with Tenten and Hinata. That in turn had her sharing Tenten and Hinata's unease around Naruto. Naruto in turn picked up on it and soured his mood further.

It was a dour group that left the silent commonroom, the air of unease spreading over the entire eating area, discouraging normal breakfast chatter. Benji, the innkeeper, was left waving half-heartedly goodbye as the four ninja departed. Naruto had given his mother a brief hug and a terse farewell before joining the others.

The quad made good time to the Final Redoubt, cutting through the crowds in their own personal bubble. A guide was assigned to them once in the fortress, a first lieutenant, sharply dressed and almost overly formal. He lead them into an area of the fortress that Naruto had never been in before. Apparently, the Final Redoubt had space for at least one whole division of infantry, or so the sign over one of the many doors they passed through implied, stating they were entering the territory of the Second Legion, 5th Regiment. Naruto had no idea what that meant, but probably meant that these guys were among the elite, if they warranted housing within the Final Redoubt itself.

Their guide followed green signs with white text until they arrived at the billet of the 4th squad of the 3rd Company, colloquially known as Bad Company. Their guide did not elaborate.

"Officer on deck!" The near shout was followed up by the clap of boots on stone as close to instantly as was humanly possible. Their lieutenant set the soldiers back at ease and told everyone to gather round. The space was moderately large, about forty or fifty feet square, with a pool table, a television several large speakers and one wall covered in nothing but maps. The area seemed to serve as a combination rec room-slash-briefing area.

Their guide had just opened his mouth to speak when Tenten preempted him. "YOU!" She declared, thrusting a finger out at the soldier that had announced their arrival.

Everyone was struck speechless, even Tenten apparently surprised at her outburst. "Him?" Naruto asked.

"Ah..."

"You again," the soldier said instead. "You're the bitch who cheated on the shooting range."

Naruto did not know exactly what was going on, other than the fact that this was apparently the sergeant that Tenten had beaten the previous week. That said, nobody called either of his women names and got away with it. Thrusting an arm out in front of Tenten, Naruto stepped forward. "Excuse me soldier, but I do not think I caught your name."

The man had a good foot, almost a foot and half on Naruto, but he saw the double bars on Naruto's shoulders and backed down. "Sergeant Kurosaki Seiji, sir."

"Sergeant Kurosaki, my name is Hyuuga Naruto." That made the sergeant, and a few of the other soldiers do a double take. "Now, I am pretty young, I admit, so I am not real sure about how things are run around here, but I am pretty sure you did not call Command Sergeant Major Higurashi here a bitch, as she is a superior officer."

"Ah, no, sir."

"At the same time I know that you will be completely respectful to me and Command Master Sergeant Hyuuga and Command Master Sergeant Higurashi as well. Have I made myself understood?"

"Yes, sir," Kurosaki said.

"Good. Sergeant, are these all your men?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Have them gather round." The room was not large, and nobody was speaking quietly, so the other soldiers did so with a glance from the sergeant. There were ten of them, including Kurosaki, all in their late twenties or early thirties. When they had all arranged themselves in front of Naruto, he spoke again. "Sergeant Kurosaki, may I assume that you have all been briefed on the parameters of your mission?"

"We have, sir. We have been assigned as your protective detail while you are on your mission, sir. We were not informed of the exact nature of it, and to be frank, I would like to keep it that way. I was told that we would be traveling to Lightning and Rock at some point in the future, and we have to keep you from getting kidnapped or killed."

"Well, that about sums it all up." Naruto turned to the last man in the room. "And I assume you are my Acolyte escort?"

"You may assume that correctly," he responded. The man was above average height, about six foot, six-two or so, with dark hair and eyes. His mouth seemed to be permanently set into a thin line, but his words were neutral enough. "I am Father Hastings Alexander VIII. I was the preceptor of the preceptory outside the city until His Excellency the Archbishop reassigned me to this mission. I have to say that I have never met a Jinchuuriki before. I think this will be a rather educational trip for me."

"That is an odd name."

The Acolyte gave Naruto a small smile that never touched his eyes. "Yes, well, the religious order that I belong to only recruits from a small number of rather insular families. My family is quite old, tracing our lineage back before the Third World War."

"Well, whatever. In any case, how long until everyone is ready to leave?"

"My men and I are ready to depart when you are, sir."

"As am I, Captain," the Acolyte said, dropping a hand onto a large backpack.

"Very well. Sergeant, gather your men and let's go." Naruto turned to the Acolyte. "Do you have a title or something that I should call you by?"

"You may call me Preceptor or Father Alexander, whichever you prefer."

"Okay. Father, if you will gather your things, we need to leave."

"Excuse me, sir, but there is one last thing. I was instructed to deliver this to you when you arrived today. It is from the Daimyo."

Naruto frowned and took the leather courier pouch from the sergeant. Inside was another pouch, better made, weatherproof and the lip off the envelope was covered in a myriad of seals, all designed to prevent someone from either looking inside or opening it. There was a note attached.

_Captain Hyuuga,_

_This was intercepted by Kirigakure Marines several months ago on a pirate ship flying a black flag after an engagement at sea. Pirate attacks have been unusually low for the last several months, which makes this interception of particular interest. The captain of the pirate ship that was taken was found trying to destroy the package in his cabin as his ship was boarded. Both Kiri and our own codebreakers have been unable to unseal the envelope because of a seal unique to Konoha. The agent that was sent to us has proven to be of insufficient ability, and so we entrust this to you. It is our hope that Jiraiya-dono will be able to unseal and decipher its contents._

_In Our hand,_

_Urashima Yamamoto  
Third of the Name  
Lord of the Land of Fire  
Guardian of the Empire_

Naruto read it, Tenten and Hinata doing so as well over his shoulders before he examined the courier pouch in more detail. He recognized most of the seals, but there were several over the very center that were simple scribbles, not letters or words or even symbols, just random-seeming squiggles.

Naruto handed the note to Jiraiya after he was done with it, and had the pouch snatched out of his grasp as soon as Jiraiya finished.

Naruto was about ready to ask what that had been about, but stopped himself when he saw the grim set to his teacher's lips and the furrows of his brow. "What's wrong?" Naruto asked simply.

"This letter is bad news in any number of ways. I recognize the seal used on this, an encrypted seal that has not been used for four or five years now. And there is the matter of the ship that it was taken from." Everyone waited for Jiraiya's next words.

"It means, in all likelihood, that the Jester of Tortuga has become involved. Things have just become a great deal more dangerous."

OoOoO

**A/N:** Well this took considerably longer than I had anticipated, but there is a lot of set up in this chapter, and I had to work some background stuff out so I don't dig myself into holes later on. I have tried to foreshadow some of the things that are revealed in this chapter for a while now, but I am not sure exactly how well I have done so. In any case, this chapter has a lot of information about my Narutoverse and introduces some characters that will be joining the main cast for a while, as well as one particular villain that I have been itching to just mention for a long time.

Again, I hope to have Chapter 5 out soonish, but between school, work and family, I am lucky if I get three or four hours of writing done a week. Again, I thank everyone who has stayed with me so far, and hope that you will continue to stick with me.


	5. Travels, By Foot and Thought

**Chapter Five: Travels, By Foot and Thought**

It took Naruto less than ten minutes to start... disliking Father Alexander. Hate was too strong a word for what he felt, yet he could not say that he felt any ease in the Acolyte's presence. Jiraiya had explained the mystical power that the priest and his brethren wielded, as much as such a thing could be described, but it was something else entirely to experience the effects of that power first hand. There was nothing about the man, physically, that was especially off-putting. He was large, of a size with Jiraiya, callused hands and weather leathered skin that said that the man spent a good amount of time both outdoors and with a weapon in hand. As physically imposing as he was, Naruto was no stranger to such individuals, so that wasn't it. He held himself with a aloofness, hands held behind his back, spine ramrod straight, chin tilted at such an angle that it would have seemed like he was looking down on everyone regardless of the fact that he was tall enough to actually do so.

In any case, Naruto seemed to be the only one feeling it, so he assumed it was just him. He pushed the sensation to the back of his mind as best he was able and focused on the conversation at hand.

Jiraiya was standing before the motley crew holding the sealed messenger pouch. "The Jester of Tortuga, alternately called the Sparrow, a title supposedly handed down from the first Pirate Emperor, is the undisputed master of everything criminal in the Elemental Nations. He rules from the Isle de Muerta, Isle of Death, a skull-shaped piece of land, if it is that, that cannot be found unless one already knows where it is. Pirates do not have to give their allegiance to him, but if they want his protection they do. A pirate that does sail for the Pirate Emperor uses a black flag, in imitation of the Black Pearl, which is the only ship that has black sails. Supposedly, the sails are stained black from the blood that they have been dipped in. Gato, the guy that took over Wave a while back, he is seriously small-time compared to the Jester.

"There is a council of nine pirate lords that help the Jester maintain his rule over his empire, such that it is. Each one carries a piece of eight, a currency from centuries before the Third World War, and is the symbol of their office. The only way to gain a seat on the council is to kill the previous owner, take his piece of eight, and go before the Jester, all the while avoiding being backstabbed yourself.

"However, there is good news to balance the bad. This letter is from my spy inside Akatsuki, so I can open it and see just what it says. Sergeant Kurosaki, I require a fountain pen and an inkwell." The sergeant walked over to the desk in front of the wall of maps, followed by Jiraiya and everyone else. Going to the opposite side, he withdrew the items from a drawer and placed them on the desk. Setting the letter down, Jiraiya took a kunai and cut his palm, fisting his hand and dribbling the blood into the inkjar. Taking the pen, he dipped the nib into the ink and pulled the lever back to fill it.

"Naruto, come here. Have you ever had any instruction on encrypted key seals?

"I know what they are, but other than that, no. I have never even seen one before."

"Well, then watch and learn. Hinata-chan, Tenten-chan, you need to pay attention as well. What can any of you tell me about these seals here?"

The envelope was made of plain brown leather, worked so that the flap tucked into itself to create a water-tight seal. There were two circle seals on the flap side, one within another, on the flap and the part of the envelope that the flap tucked into. It was these seals that Jiraiya pointed to.

"Well, the outermost seal is just a general purpose privacy seal. Can't look through the leather, and can't listen through it if there was anything to hear. The second seal is a keep-it-closed seal, a door seal."

"Pretty good Naruto. Now is there anything you can tell me about all this here?" Jiraiya asked, pointing to the grouping of apparently random and nonsensical scribbles.

"Well, except for the 'explosion' seal-set here in the very center, it just looks like someone closed their eyes and started drawing scribbling."

"Good. If you had been able to make sense of it, I would have been extremely surprised. This is the 'encrypted' part of the seal here. You see the 'explosion' seal there, obviously. If someone were to beat the door seal and tried to open it, it would explode. Enough to destroy the document, and maybe take a hand, but not much more."

"So I take it the scribbles somehow neutralize the 'explosion' seal somehow?"

"Exactly right. But first, I want you to take a closer look at the 'explosion' seal." Jiraiya reached into a pocket and withdrew a loupe. Naruto took the hand lens and set it on the envelope over the 'explosion' seal. He slowly moved it over the three-character seal before straightening. "There is a compacted seal in there."

"Very good Naruto. Now, you can't tell, but that is an anti-tampering seal. Do anything to alter the seal other than how it is supposed to be, and it goes boom."

"How can you tell? You didn't even look at it," Hinata asked.

"I know because I know the person who sent it."

"Your Akatsuki contact who you won't tell us anything about," Tenten said.

"My Akatsuki contact that I won't tell you anything about because that information is only known to four people other than me, and only shared on a need-to-know basis, which you don't. In any case, onto the scribbles. While they may look like nonsense, these are not random doodles, but a half-finished seal."

Naruto frowned. "So I guess you have to complete the seal to open the pouch?" Jiraiya nodded. "But how do you not blow it up? Didn't you just say that there was an anti-tamper seal on the 'explosion' seal?"

"There is. And normally, that would be a problem, if the key seal was not included." The others just stared blankly. "Okay, so the way that the anti-tamper seal work is it is drawn around a secondary set of seals. The anti-tamper seal sort of... records whatever is drawn inside it when it is compacted. Usually, when a seal is compacted, it shrinks anything that is in it as well, but the anti-tamper seal is deliberately designed not to do just that."

"Okay, but how does it tell if something is added or erased once it has been compacted? It isn't like it can think or anything."

"You are right. It is simple ink and chakra, it has no intelligence. But when the anti-tamper seal is compacted, it leaves a very delicate trace chakra ring behind, which if disturbed, such as by altering any of the contained seals, disrupts the ring, which sets off the actual anti-tamper seal and all the rest."

"So shouldn't completing the seal set it off then?"

"No. That half-finished seal is the key seal that will disable the anti-tamper seal. You could sort think of the key seal as sitting in a sort of blind spot in the anti-tamper seal's metaphysical vision. The key seal is the only seal that will not set the anti-tamper seal off because the anti-tamper seal cannot sense it."

Taking the pen he bent over the envelope and began connecting the scribbles. It took him several minutes, but when he had finished, the entire array glowed blue for a split-second and flashed away in a puff of smoke.

"The only real trick to one of these is that you have to know the counterseal. If you do not complete the correct seal, well you know what happens." Naruto nodded. "In any case, time to see what was in here." Jiraiya opened the pouch, only to reveal two numbers. Tenten slumped.

"You are kidding. All that crap on the outside and all we get is the number 42? What the hell?"

"Hold on, Tenten-chan. Do you remember that Yakushi kid that showed you his ninja info cards during the Chunin Exam?"

"How'd you know about that?" Tenten asked.

"Naruto is the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki and my student's son. Of course I am keeping tabs on him, and you two by extension."

Naruto frowned. "I am not sure whether to be creeped out or relieved."

"Of course you should be relieved. In fact you should be angry."

"Why?"

"Just think of all the things I could have taught you all these years, had you had the privilege of my tutelage."

Naruto turned to Hinata and Tenten. "If either of you two ever start to see me act like Ero-sennin, I beg you to break out the amnesia hammer." The girls grinned.

Jiraiya scowled. "If you don't mind, how about we get back to the matter at hand?"

"Not that there is much to discuss," Tenten muttered. "Seriously, all that trouble and a single number is all we get. It isn't even long enough to be a code."

"But it is. Watch this." Jiraiya held the piece of paper out and stared at it for a moment. There was a momentary flare of chakra, and the two digits changed. "Okay, more numbers. N33°43'27" E113°28'43" 9/14 1300.

"They are coordinates for a meeting. Already passed, but..." Jiraiya paused and walked over to the large map behind the desk. Dragging his index finger over the map, he stopped and tapped his finger on a point near the border with River Country, about a hundred miles south of the capital.

Jiraiya turned to the other other soldiers and Acolyte in the room. "Anyone know anything about this town?" Nobody responded so he just harrumphed and turned back to the map. "No major roads marked, no overt military assets nearby, and well out of the way of all that. Sounds like a pretty good location for a secret meeting." Shaking his mane, Jiraiya sighed. Folding the paper up he turned to Sergeant Kurosaki, he said, "well, there isn't much chance of finding anything out, but you never know, there may well be someone who remembers something significant. An innkeeper, a woodsman who stumbled on the meeting and waiting for the authorities is how I would write it, were it a story."

Tapping the envelope against his hand, he tossed it onto the desk. "You can get that back to your bosses."

"If there isn't anything else, we can cover some distance before tonight." Naruto paused for a moment, looking at the map and the legend. "We should be able to make it to Iron in a week, maybe less." With a nod from Kurosaki, the other soldiers dispersed to their bunks to retrieve their packs.

It took several minutes to reach the interior stables, a room the size of a barn hewn from the living stone, stall walls, support beams and loft complete, the air redolent with the heavy odor of horse dung, hay, oil and leather. Sergeant Kurosaki walked up to the head groom and handed the man a sheet of paper. The groom glanced at the sheet and turned to shout at the other side of the barn, calling several stablehands from their chores to prepare horses for the Bad Company men. In the space of time that it had taken the whole group to arrive at the stables, the head groom had sixteen horses readied, ten for the soldiers, six as remounts and packhorses. The Acolyte had said that he had been in charge of a facility outside the city, but he walked up to a large grey stallion, which greeted him with familiarity.

The stables were just a short hallway away from an exterior gate that left them on a narrow cobbled path that led to a guarded gate in a wall, which finally brought them to the Black City. Kurosaki and his squad mounted up with varying degrees of skill. Horses were a valuable resource, taking time and care to keep healthy, hence the reason that normally only officers, couriers and the like ever got to ride. Sergeant Kurosaki mounted his horse in a single smooth swing, the rest of the men of Bad Company mounting with better-than-expected facility, yet not what one could describe as grace.

The group made good time out of the city, a group of nearly twenty armed and uniformed men prompting the city crowds to part easily. Once past the gate guards, the Legion soldiers were able to speed up to a quick canter, paced by the shinobi up in the trees.

Like Sunagakure, which was located deep in the Great Thirst, Kumogakure which was surrounded by the cloud-piercing World's Maw mountains, Kirigakure, which was bordered on its landward side by the Drowned Land, a massive swamp that was one of the least explored areas of the world, Konohagakure had been built in the most remote reaches of the least easily navigable terrain available, lost in the thickest parts of the Green Desert, the massive deciduous forest at the heart of the Land of Fire. While it was possible to transverse the Green Desert on foot on the forest floor, given the lack of established roads, especially around Konoha, it was often far quicker to travel through the canopy. As a result, the shinobi of Konoha usually preferred to do so. Such tree travel always appeared more to be far more energy-intensive than it actually was. Instead of pushing chakra out one's feet or calves, as might be thought, one merely pumped chakra to their legs in time to their stride, flexing their metaphysical muscles, strengthening physical muscles to the point where one could spend hours leaping through the tree tops before getting tired.

Traveling in the canopy, the shinobi were able to, at times, travel faster than their Legion escort. The soldiers did not gallop their horses in pursuit of the ninja, rather jogging along side their trotting animals for a mile, then riding them for a mile, then jogging again. It was a deceptively speedy pace, despite the sixty pound packs they each wore. Even Father Alexander joined the soldiers as they jogged alongside their mounts.

However, just because the shinobi were able to travel faster than the soldiers, it did not mean that there was breath or time for conversation.

Camp was only made after the sun had set and it became too dark to continue. As might be expected, the first night out of UMC, the party split into two camps, one for the shinobi and one for the priest and soldiers a few yards away. Once a campsite had been selected, Team Nine split to perform their duties. Naruto created a dozen shadow clones, two helping Hinata chopping the ingredients for the stew, two setting up the tents and unpacking the cookware, the other eight assisting Tenten.

The defenses were relatively light, given that they were in friendly territory and not really expecting to have to fend off an attack, but they were ninja, and as such, were trained to expect an attack at any time, even when the likelihood was practically nonexistent. So watches were organized, in two hour shifts, with Jiraiya taking the first shift, and Hinata, with her Byakugan, taking the last.

At the same time Tenten and Naruto were fortifying the camp, they also set out snares, traps for rabbits and squirrel and chipmunks, or if they were particularly lucky, a deer.

A battalion of clones was created and established a picket around both camps. Jiraiya sat off to one side supervising, pen and paper out, and occasionally making some kind of notation. Dinner was a pot of stew, carrots, henpeas, onions and potatoes mixed in with bouillon cubes and dried beef.

It was October, and got dark around seven or so, which left an hour for making camp and dinner, and another hour for lessons. Naruto taught Hinata and Tenten sealing, covering a single subject in a couple of nights, as most of what he had to teach was pure memorization.

Sunrise was at about six a.m., and camp was broken by six thirty. Again, the ninja traveled in the canopy, mostly out of sight, while Father Alexander, Sergeant Kurosaki and the other Legion soldiers alternated riding and jogging. The march was halted for half an hour some time around two for lunch, then it was back into the trees and into the saddle. The group traveled until it was dark. Camp was made, defenses were set.

Once all the camp chores were completed and dinner was being prepared, Tenten took Naruto and Hinata aside leaving a pair of clones to watch over the food.

Tenten turned to Naruto and squared her shoulders. "Naruto-kun we need to talk."

"Okay, I don't like where this is going already."

"Naruto-kun, this is serious."

"Okay, okay," Naruto responded, holding his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. "I'm listening Tenten-chan."

"Naruto-kun, do you love me?" Tenten asked.

"What? Of course I do Tenten!"

"Do you love Hinata?"

"Absolutely!"

"And what about yourself? Don't you care about yourself?"

"What do you mean? Of course I do."

"Do you really? Now that you got permission from the Daimyo, things are going to change. It is going to be a lot more dangerous than they have been. I mean, you have at least seven, probably more like nine S-rank missing-nin after you. I know that you are strong, Naruto-kun, the one of the strongest ninja in Konoha, but even you have to admit that you can't take on Itachi Clan-killer or the Monster of the Mist or Hidan the Immortal. Once Akatsuki realizes what you are doing, they are going to come after you hard and fast. And you have to admit that you are not exactly the most cautious member of our team."

"What do you mean? I am always careful."

"Naruto-kun, you allowed yourself to be stabbed through the heart by that samurai in Wave, leaped out of a window to face off against a monster that had nearly killed Hinata in Grass, charged straight into Neji's Kaiten in the Finals, and then took that giant sand monster single handedly while suffering from second degree chakra burns on both arms."

"Naruto-kun, your life is not your own anymore. You belong to us, and we belong to you. When you are injured, you are not the only one that hurts. When you have to go to the hospital, Tenten and I have to suffer along with you while you heal. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to see you lying in the hospital, unconscious, not able to know when you will wake up?" Both Tenten and Hinata had unreadable looks on their faces, although Hinata's voice almost broke towards the end of her little speech.

"Neh, you guys don't need to worry so much. After all, I can heal from just about anything I am hit with, thanks to the fox."

Hinata furrowed her brows in actual anger at that. Naruto was caught totally off guard when Hinata drew her hand back and lashed out with a full-arm slap across the face. "Don't you.. _dare_ be so casual about your well being, Naruto-kun. You are my life, my world, my everything. Before you, I was weak, shy. I was nobody. No one respected me, no one cared about me, no one loved me. Before you I _was_ nothing. So you do not get to just brush our concern aside, like it doesn't matter. Naruto, I _cannot _lose you. If you were to die, I would lay down on your grave and die also. Naruto... I..."

Naruto reflexively enclosed her in a hug when she collapsed against him, trying to suppress her tears. Looking at the top of her head in stunned disbelief, he mulled her words over. He had never thought of how some of his actions would impact her and Tenten, and was immediately ashamed. Hinata, who in many ways had had as little as he did when she was growing up, had never poured her soul out to him like that, and it shocked him. He couldn't ever remember a time where she had struck him out of anger, hell he had a hard time thinking of one instance of her striking him outside of santioned combat. And hearing how utterly devoted she was to him, to the point of refusing to live if he died, it was scary. No, it was terrifying.

So that is why he was barely able to do more than hug her and almost absently rub her back as she cried into his shirt.

A few seconds later, once she had gotten control of her emotions, she pulled away. Averting her gaze in shame she folded her eyes and stepped away. She couldn't believe that she had said what she said to him. And hitting him! She didn't think that he would hit her back, but she was sure that she had lost whatever respect she had gained in his eyes.

Tenten, for her part, was nearly gaping. Sure, she loved Naruto with all her heart, but to hear Hinata voice such devotion, she kind of wondered who the hell she was against all that. Not for the first time she felt more than a little resentment to Hinata for overshadowing her in just about every way possible. Hinata was a wonderful cook, had the kind of figure that most would kill for already, had managed her family's finances for years and she could only imagine just the kinds of things she could do with her chakra control. Beside Hinata's near tirade, her lecture was little more than an admonishment. When Hinata melted into Naruto's arms weeping, she very nearly scowled. Still, there was very little she could do about it. After all, it wasn't as if she could berate Hinata for loving Naruto too much.

When Hinata finally managed to pull away and dry her eyes, Tenten spoke again, trying to somehow match Hinata, although she wasn't sure how. After Hinata, there seemed to be little else to say but she tried anyways. "Naruto-kun, you have to think about the people who care about you when you fight. How would you feel if it had been me that went to fight the sand monster all by myself and without any backup?"

"I... see... I am sorry. I know I wasn't thinking when I was fighting Gaara, but that was something I had to do alone. I am the only one who could have taken him on safely. Once he had transformed, even the Hokage might have had trouble with him. But I will try as hard as I can to never do that again. Please forgive me."

Raising her head from under her bangs, Hinata offered a small smile. "Of course Naruto-kun. Just please never do that again."

"Or we might have to take more drastic measures." This too was offered with a gentle smile and a pistol twirl from the gun-toting woman.

Scratching the back of his head nervously, Naruto hastily agreed.

"Now, for the reason I wanted to talk to you. I want you and Hinata to learn to shoot," Tenten said, drawing one of her new pistols and tossing a scroll up in the air. It came down with three large bullet holes, any closer and the three would be one. "I want you to be able to do that."

"Why? Naruto asked simply.

"Because I want you to," Tenten replied as simply. "Hinata and I started learning the Rasengan because you wanted us be be able to defend ourselves better. I want the same of you."

"Aw, come on Tenten. I am the freaking Kyuubi Jinchuuriki. At the risk of repeating myself-"

He was cut off by a bullet impacting a tree two feet behind him and about two inches to the left. "Humor me."

Naruto scowled. "And why Hinata?"

"Why not Hinata? Remember how you said that neither Hinata or I has a true one-hit-kill technique when you started teaching us the Rasengan? The same could be said of you and Hinata in regard to long-range techniques. Both of you are close-range fighters. Having the ability to fight at both short and long range can only make you stronger. And besides, you love her, and gods forbid, were she to be killed, I know you would be devastated. So anything that makes her harder to kill is only good, the same as you."

"You have a point, I suppose."

"Of course I do."

"I guess that we can stop an hour earlier or so to get in some practice. I do want to get to Iron as soon as possible, but losing an hour of travel a day won't delay us too much."

"Good. It is decided then. I can give you your first lesson during dinner."

"How many guns do you carry now?"

"Well, my two Winchester rifles, my two Moses Brothers pistols and my two single-shot derringers. So six."

OoOoO

Sakura sat, like she did most mornings, in a thin-cushioned, cold metal wire chair, one that was missing one of the padded cloth armrests, in the hospital's secure ward lobby. She nodded to the nurses as they passed, and received a nod back in most cases. Those that did not return her nod usually gave her a brief glare before ignoring her. This was not her first visit to the hospital, or her fifth, or tenth. She had gotten used to the cold shoulder that she received from some of the nurses, and it no longer bothered her. She was here for Sasuke, and that was really all that mattered. He did not speak to her most of the time, or even look at her, but she came anyways. It was important, she told herself, that she kept doing so. It had been over a month since Naruto had brought Sasuke back to her, over a month since she started visiting him. She passed the rows of heavy steel doors, each with a narrow sliding peephole and white number. 112, that was the number that the nurse brought her to, and 112 was the number behind which Sasuke was. The room was bright, as usual, the white tile floor, walls and ceiling reflecting and amplifying what early-morning light the single triple-thick paned window let in.

Sakura's chakra stopped in her veins when she entered the room, or so it felt, and everything dimmed, dulled and simply became... less. She hated the feeling, but Sasuke was here, so she had no choice.

"Good morning Sasuke-kun," she said quietly, as she did every morning. She fluffed his pillow, smoothed his blankets and raised the back of his bed so that he was in a sitting position. His breakfast was untouched, as usual, so she picked up his bowl of cereal and began to feed him. Once feeding him his breakfast had been an exciting experience, but ritual had long since robbed the act of any sort of pleasure. Sasuke ate mechanically, only opening his mouth when the spoon touched his lips, and only giving one or two halfhearted chews before swallowing. Once his breakfast was done with, she put the tray aside and sat, saying nothing, doing nothing, expecting nothing. Sakura had taken what Naruto had said to heart, and was determined to be the one who would be there for Sasuke, no matter how long it took. At first, she had tried to draw him out of his melancholy by talking, just chatter really, but that had seemed to make him retreat into himself even more, and nearly thrown out once. So now she just sat silently, watching him stare out the window, _knowing_ it was just a matter of time before he broke down and started speaking to her.

As much as she hated to admit it, she had never been particularly close to Sasuke, even after they had been assigned to the same genin cell. In the beginning, Sasuke paid her barely any more attention than he had when they were classmates. Sakura was not a fool. She knew that Sasuke was not going to change overnight and magically fall in love with her and become a caring and conscientious boyfriend once they became teammates. She did not expect him to proclaim undying love for her after a few short weeks. But however much she wanted Sasuke, she wanted him as he was.

She wanted the quiet, confident, arrogant Sasuke that she had known in the Academy, and gotten to known better, even if it was only slightly, on Team Seven. She knew that the Cursed Seal of Heaven that Orochimaru had given him had hurt him, had wounded him heart-deep and twisted and begun to corrupt his mind. Before the Forest of Death, before he was defeated by his brother, before he tried to defect, he had been Sasuke, cold, a little rude at times, the best shinobi of their generation. But after... after there had been times when he had genuinely scared her.

There had been a mission, a week or so after the Sand/Sound invasion, to River. It had been fairly routine C-rank, in the way that nightmare missions usually appeared to be. The client was a businessman that contracted them to protect a factory and workers from a mercenary company that a rival had hired in order to put him out of business. They had not been told what was being produced in the factory and not to concern themselves with it.

The factory was built on the banks of one of the thousand tributary rivers that gave the country its name. There was a town, several miles off, the only major settlement for a good distance in any direction. The prairie was dotted here and there with thickets, bunches of trees that covered no more than a two or three hundred yards, and none near enough to stage an effective ambush from.

The factory workers lived in a dorm that had been built next door, and was where Team Seven had been housed as well. The workers lived at the factory in six-week shifts, and it thought that the mercenaries would probably wait for the new batch of factory workers to arrive, and then strike in what they hoped to be the ensuing confusion. So, three weeks of hurry-up-and-wait led to three days of sleeping in shifts and sitting on needles for an attack that had to come sooner rather than later. And it came sooner.

It began with an explosion. Team Seven had not been the only "security consultants" that the client had hired for protection, merely the best. Each of the four members of Team Seven had been placed at the head of a squad of "protection specialists," Sakura and her squad tasked with the safety of the workers themselves, while Kakashi, Sasuke, Kiba and their men guarded the factory itself.

The first explosion took out the entire southern wall of the factory. It was night time, of course, and the entire area wreathed in darkness so Stygian that she got ghostly images across her sight when she waved her hands before her face. That alone was enough to put everyone on their guard, as such a darkness was, plainly put, unnatural. The fact that their attackers could summon such darkness told them more about the capabilities of their enemy than their employer had.

In any case, whoever the opposing force had working for them, all it meant was that they had to keep an eye out for any spellslingers and be a mite more wary of a trap. The first impulse was to race to the south end of the factory, but that would likely only lead them into an ambush, the attackers waiting for the first responders and then either setting off a secondary explosion or making an assault. Sakura and her men quickly spread through the dorm, telling the workers to return to their rooms and lock the doors. Ordering her men to take up defensive positions, she rendezvoused with the rest of her team. Kakashi had sent clones into the surrounding area to try thwart the possibility of a multi-pronged attack.

The effort was soon rendered moot as several dozen men rose from the river, all equipped with shallow-water rebreathers. All but one seemed to be normal soldiers, the apparent leader rising from the river, dark robes streaming water as he lifted his hands and cried out in some language that seemed to make the air throb and hurt Sakura's ears. Both sides charged, while the berobed figure continued to chant in his alien tongue. Drawing her sword, she followed her teammate into the melee, heeling Sasuke closely. They were two thirteen year old children, and had a few precious seconds before they were noticed. Taking her sword in both hands, she began swinging. Sakura mostly concerned herself with protecting her allies, flitting between the adults, parrying a thrust here, hamstringing an enemy there. Unfortunately, the eney outnumbered them at least three to one, so preserving their numbers was a priority.

She felt it when Sasuke unleashed the Cursed Seal, the sudden flare and darkening of his chakra. She hated it when Sasuke used the Cursed Seal. It warped him, made him meaner, crueler. Ruthless. It made his chakra repellent, foul and dark. But, she could not deny that it made him faster, stronger. Deadly.

She kept track of her teacher and Kiba as best as she was able, the other two members of her team carving through the enemy, Kiba with his Getsuugas and a amped up Akamaru, Kakashi with kunai and several lightning techniques.

It did not take long for Sakura and Sasuke to be noticed, and then it became a challenge just to stay alive. The enemy mercenaries had identified Sakura and her teammates as the biggest threat, and rightly so.

It wasn't until she saw one of the mercenaries that the client had hired dissolve into shadow and dust that she realized that the berobed man had ceased his shouting. Extricating herself from the melee, she saw that he was now hurling spheres of darkness into the crush, seemingly thrusting his hands into the very fabric of the night and pulling them out back into sight, fingers dripping darkness that killed anything that it touched. He flung globules of night into the crowd, uncaring of who he hit.

But she had not been the first to notice him. Looking back into the crowd, she saw that Sasuke had gone into overdrive, Cursed Seal in full extension, killing mercs left and right. He cut a swathe through the men, and he broke through the enemy side in seconds. She started after him, but Kakashi materialized from nowhere and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Let him deal with the wizard. Where are your men?"

"Back at the dorm," Sakura said.

"Good. As long as we can hold them off here, the workers should be fine. Go support Kiba," he said, pointing to her other teammate. "I will help Sasuke." Kakashi was her teacher and her commander, so despite that she wanted to be the one to help Sasuke, and Kakashi be the one to help Kiba, she did as she was told. But Sasuke really did not need much help. Sasuke was standing over the man, slowly pushing his hands, still covered in congealed darkness, to his face. She saw, across the field, as Sasuke pressed the man's hands to his face.

He screamed.

Sakura watched as Sasuke kept the man's hands pressed to his face, pressing them into his face. The man's head seemed to melt, to dissolve around his own hands. There was a heartbeat, maybe two of silence from the man before there was a pulse, a blast of energy that knocked Sasuke off his feet, as well as everyone else in thirty feet.

The fighting stopped, between Sasuke, Kiba and Kakashi, the enemy mercs overwhelmed without their magical support.

In the end, everyone made it through the mission without serious injury, but it was the sight of Sasuke, tattooed like a savage, bloody crimson eyes, hands covered in blood and brain matter that stuck with her the most.

She hadn't spoken to anyone about what she saw, not Ino, not Kakashi, and did not plan to. But she knew what she had seen. Evil. Evil lurking in the perfect sight of her beloved.

She was so thankful that Orochimaru's attempt to kidnap Sasuke's physical body had failed, but she had never wondered how close he was to having Sasuke's soul. Orochimaru was the most reviled villain in the whole history of Konoha, guilty of murdering the very people he was sworn to protect with his life, the thought of having Sasuke thought of in the same way...

It only made her more sure that she had to be the one for him, she had to be the who he would open up to, _had_ to be the one who he could trust enough so she could change his heart.

Eventually, Sakura had to leave, an hour all she could spare in her increasingly busy schedule. Because of Sasuke's attemped defection, Team Seven had been suspended, removed from the active roster pending the outcome of Sasuke's evaluation. They still met as a team, but were not allowed to take mission, even D-ranks, or really do anything in their offical role as Konoha shinobi.

That did not mean that Sakura had stopped training though. A few days after Sasuke had been returned, Sakura had gone to the Hokage and asked to become her apprentice.

**Flashback no Jutsu!**

"Why?"

"Because I need strength, Hokage-sama."

"Because you need strength? Your teammate, Uchiha Sasuke is being investigated for treason and attempted defection. Your whole team has been suspended because of this and are still under suspicion. Beyond that, I already have an apprentice, and if I were to want another, why should I take you, who has no medical training? I get dozens of requests a year to take someone under my tutelage. Why are you special?"

"I have excellent chakra control, and I am very smart, I learn fast and am willing to do whatever I need to do."

"You just read me the resume of overy single person who has ever asked for me to teach them. So let me ask this, why do you want me to teach you?"

"Because of Sasuke."

"And let me guess: you want to become my student so that you can heal his broken heart or something." Tsunade paused, Sakura ducked her gaze. "Well, you wouldn't be the first." Tsunade raised her voice and called for her apprentice.

"Shizune, meet your new apprentice. Sakura, as I am sure you know, this is Shizune. Here is what you will do. Six months. You will study for six months under Shizune. After that, if she passes you, then you can learn from me.

"Shizune, this is a test for you as well. You have been my apprentice for fifteen-odd years now, and have learned just about everything that I have to teach you. Now it is time for you to be the teacher, and prove your knowledge. This is not going to be like anything that you have done before. If you can train Sakura, then you will have proven that you have mastered what I have taught you, and will no longer be my apprentice. Train Sakura, and your training will be complete."

"Absolutely, Master. Sakura-chan, let us get you down to the hospital. We need to get you registered at the hospital, and then we can see just how much you know."

**Flashback no Jutsu KAI!**

So that is how Sakura found herself back in class five hours a day going over everything that she had learned about the human body. Basic anatomy was drilled into all shinobi in the Academy, of course, but given that she was training to be a battlefield doctor, basic anatomy was hardly sufficient.

The hospital staff was polite and courteous, as she was Shizune's apprentice, but hardly friendly. Being one of Sasuke's teammates wasn't the boon it had once been, few actually hating her or Sasuke for his attempted defection, but it had marred his reputation in the minds of many. She had tried to explain how it hadn't actually been Sasuke's fault that he had done what he had done, but few were listening, or even wanted to.

Still, it wasn't like she was there to make friends, and a few of the other doctors and medics seemed to appreciate that. Even the ones who seemed to hold a grudge against her waited until after lessons before giving her the cold shoulder.

But if there was one thing that she loved about being apprenticed to Shizune, one thing more than anything else, it was that she got to learn. Sakura had always placed highly in her academics in the Academy, to the point where it had been suggested more than once that she be fast-tracked to graduation, but nothing ever really came of it. Now, for the first time since graduation, she arrived in a place where she could focus her talents to the maximum, a place where there was something new and interesting to learn, where she actually enjoyed what she did.

Kakashi was not that bad of a teacher, all things considering. Aside from the fact that he had never done this before, and that his experiences of his time at their age were in a totally different setting and attitude. He graduated from the Academy and entered a heavily engaged military. He had not been spared any horror, was forced to take them as they came.

Her team however had months of D-rank missions and training, even if none of it had been of direct battlefield application. Having Kiba direct Sasuke and her in helping to weed a farm, having to identify whether or not the plant needed to be removed or not without sight. Make Kiba and her to perform a delivery, with Sasuke supposed to guard the items to be delivered from them, or bring something to a certain person. Having her guard a section of fencing or wall that needed to be repainted, and letting her set up whatever defenses that she could think of, short of anything instantly lethal.

And there had been the tree walking and water walking exercises that he admitted that he had intended to show them on their first C-rank. After Team Nine beat them so handily one-on-one, Kakashi had actually taught her team their first ninjutsu. They had all tested for their affinities, Kiba and Sasuke both fire, and lighting as well for Sasuke, and earth for her.

Anko had apparently concentrated more on developing their individual skills, as they already seemed to have very finely honed teamwork, almost certainly aided by the fact that he was dating both of them. It had been a surprise move by Hiashi, marrying his heir to Naruto, and one that made many people pay much more attention to her former classmate. She watched as the trio, probably quite unknowingly, achieved what could probably be described as celebrity status, in asmuch as they gave the people who watched them plenty of things to gossip and wonder over. No one ever graced the cover of a tabloid, but the fact that it was news passed strictly by word-of-mouth almost made it seem even that much more scandalous.

Finally, just the sight of fighting Sasuke to a standstill on the roof of the hospital after the invasion, the realization that there was a very good chance that Naruto could have beaten Sasuke, instead of the other way around showed her that it was unlikely that she had ever really known the boy.

But Naruto's strength had been confirmed before even that. Seeing Naruto in action during the invasion, spawning a truly mind-boggling number of shadow clones, expending more chakra than she had ever witnessed in her life, that had been the moment when she realized that Naruto was something special. She saw his clones commanding squads of chunin and jounin, him, the goofy, stupid class clown giving men and women twenty or thirty years his senior orders and having them obeyed, seeing him _lead... _she wondered if this had been what people felt when the Fourth had been alive.

She wondered how anyone could still hate him, even despite the revelation that he housed the Kyuubi no Kitsune itself in him. And that had been a doozy. It certainly made a lot of other things make a kind of cruel sense.

She was not one of the people, both shinobi and civilian, who had joined the surprisingly public fanclub that had sprung up practically overnight, but instead watched him from a distance. Speaking to him in private, as she would have wanted to had she anything to say to him, would be had to do. It was a rare occasion when Naruto was seen in public without at least one of his two teammates. Hell, it quickly became rare to see him period, after the invasion. Naruto had always been sort of a loner, a little like Sasuke, and he probably just did not know how to deal with his sudden popularity, not something Sakura blamed him for. Had she been in either Hinata or Tenten's place, she would definitely have worried about his faithfulness, and for all she knew, maybe they did.

In the end, it had not been a huge suprise when Hinata and Tenten somehow managed to get themselves taken with Naruto when he left with Jiraiya on their training trip. Team Nine had been strong before, she wondered just how strong they would be when they returned. Sakura doubted that Naruto would be named Hokage as soon as he returned, for reasons of age as much as anything else, but she did not doubt that he would be one giving orders, or at least advising on what orders to give once he did.

If anyone could be said to be born to to lead, born to be Hokage, it was Naruto. That she was sure of.

**A/N: Happy Holidays all!**


	6. Detour

**Chapter**** 6: ****Detour**

The trip to Iron took nine days. The first morning out Jiraiya led Naruto away from camp while Hinata was making breakfast and Tenten and some clones broke down camp. "I assume that you know the handseals for the Summoning Technique?" Jiraiya said without preamble.

Naruto performed the five seals instead of saying anything. "Yes, well that is good," his teacher replied with a wry grin. "As I have told you before, the toads have a wide variety of techniques at their disposal, as well as their very own martial art, but the majority of them require some familiarity with the toads themselves. I am sure that you have been wondering why I had you sign the Toad Contract back in August but I have never introduced you to the toads. You haven't summoned any of them without me, have you?"

"No. Between one thing and another, I just assumed that it would come up when it came up. I know things have been hectic the last couple of months."

"Good. The toads are rather reclusive, for the most part, and while news of you has spread, I am sure, that does not mean that they will automatically obey you. First impressions go a long way with the toads, and I hope that I do not have to stress the fact that getting off to a bad start with them would have done you no favors. In any case, try summoning a toad. Once you have been introduced to some of them, you can summon a specific toad by holding their name in your mind as you summon. But seeing how you don't, just give it some chakra and let's see who pops up."

Naruto did as instructed, offering about as much chakra as a Rasengan. Black squiggles erupted from the point of contact with the ground and stepped back from the small plume of smoke. The toad that appeared before the human duo was small, mostly orange with purple markings on his face and stomach. He was of an approximate size as a young puppy, like Kiba's Akamaru.

"Yo," he greeted cordially with a wave of his hand. "Jiraiya!" the diminutive toad exclaimed. "What's up? Who's this guy? Why is he so small?"

"Whoa there Gamakichi," Jiraiya said to cut him off, clamping a hand down on Naruto's shoulder at the same time. "I'm sure that Gama had passed news around that you guys had a new summoner? This is him."

"Hyuuga Naruto," Naruto said somewhat stiffly.

Gamakichi frowned. "Yeah, I heard that you let someone else sign the Contract. People were starting to wonder when you would get around to introducing him. Been months."

"Yeah, sorry about that 'Kichi. Things got a little busy around here only a little while after that. It kinda just got pushed back while other things were being dealt with."

"Whatever," Gamakichi snorted. "At least he isn't some dumbass genin this time," Kichi said with a glance at Naruto's vest. "You remember how annoyed Dad was with you when you let the last brat sign the Contract."

"Yeah well... He and your dad ended up getting along well enough."

"So Dad always says. He still tell stories of that guy calling him out to help beat down that overgrown dog the Kyuubi. And showing off his scars. I wish I had been born soon enough to meet him. That would have been cool."

"Hold on, you guys aren't talking about my dad, are you?"

"Not unless your dad was Namikaze Minato. But he didn't have any kids," Gamakichi said, waving a hand.

"Actually he did," Naruto said with a little bit of pride. "I am his only son."

"No way. Jiraiya, you know what Dad thinks about liars, and you let this punk sign the Contract?"

"I'm pretty sure your father doesn't really mind that much."

"He does when they are really stupid like him."

Naruto was already scowling, so he folded his fists over his chest, gripping his biceps tightly, restraining himself from showing Gamakichi what it was like to eat out of a straw. "Jiraiya-sensei," he said tightly, "would you like to enlighten this smart-mouthed frog as to who my dad is?" Naruto ignored Kichi indignant squawk at being called a frog. Naruto may not have appreciated the bastard much, what with sealing the next best thing to evil incarnate in his soul and then dying before he had the chance to do more than name him, but his father had been a badass, no doubt about that.

"Gamakichi, this is Minato's son. He wasn't married to Naruto's mother, but this is son. I can personally attest to that, by virtue of his thick skull, if nothing else."

Naruto ignored the insult and kept glaring at the toad. "I've seen pictures, and I guess he does look a little like him. Eh, whatever. Was there anything else you wanted Jiraiya?"

"Nah, that was about it."

"Okie-day then. I will let Dad and the rest know about this."

"Thanks 'Kichi."

Naruto opened his mouth to protest his supposed summon desummoning without his permission, but Jiraiya spoke first. "Each of the Summoned Clans have their own way of doing thing, according to their nature. Dogs, wolves, and there is a difference between the two, for example, will follow anyone who has earned their loyalty, or that of their packleader. Snakes, hawks, various kinds of demons and some insects will obey just about anyone who signs their Contract, but the more powerful ones require some sort of sacrifice or offering before they will obey. The monkeys and tigers won't obey unless you can beat them or the packleader in single combat. Slugs and tortoises will only obey if the summoner had a preexisting arrangement with their boss. Toads won't mind helping you if you summoned them in the middle of battle, but you better make sure that you call them up again to thank them for your help afterwards, and introduce yourself personally if you haven't already. They are very touchy about their pride, much like the dogs, wolves and monkeys are.

"Are all the toads as bratty as that one?"

"Bratty? I wouldn't say that to any of their faces, but I guess you could say so. Most summoned clans have some sort of secret technique, much like human clans, and that sort of gives the toads a superiority complex at times. I won't tell you what it is, that is not a privilege that you have earned, but it is different from most others of the type."

"What do I have to do to be able to learn it?"

"There is nothing specifically you can do. It is a matter of when the toads judge you worthy to do so, if they ever do. Minato never learned it, because for all his virtues, he was arrogant. Rightly so, for the most part, but that is the kind of thing that breaks the deal for them."

"Do you know it?"

"I do, but I won't show you."

Naruto scowled again. "Freaking buzzkill." Jiraiya offered him a small smile.

"Such is life. I know that I have not devoted much time to your sage training, but that ends now. One of the two techniques that I am about to give you is the Toad Oil Bullet. Perform the jutsu and you will spit out a globule of sticky, flammable oil. It will immobilize anything it touches, and if you use a fire technique on it, like the Fire Release: Flame Bullet, which is the other technique, they go up like a match." Jiraiya held the scroll out to Naruto, but didn't let go. "I am trusting you with this technique Naruto. Lose this scroll and I will be very displeased with you. Nor are you to let either of your teammates look at it either, this is just for you. Am I clear?"

"Crystal."

"Good. I want you to be able to use both of those techniques in three days. I agreed to take you on as my apprentice because you have potential, Naruto, the potential to be the greatest Hokage that ever lived or a monster to make Orochimaru nothing but a footnote in the history books. Now is the time for you to start living up to it."

"I will never become a monster like Orochimaru," Naruto said defiantly, crossing his arms over his chest.

"You don't know that. What would you have been like if Anko had not adopted you? Can you say that you would be the same person you are now? Can you say that you would not become like Gaara?"

"I..."

"And that is why I said you have potential, Naruto, just potential. Potential does not care about good and bad, potential does not care about right and wrong, potential does not care about duty or honor. Potential is. And it can be used for good or evil."

"I..." Naruto began again, thinking about what Jiraiya had said. What would he be like without his mother? Like Gaara? The thought chilled him. But then he thought of Orochimaru, and determination flashed through his eyes.

"I could have ended up like Gaara, but I will never end up like Orochimaru."

"I cannot say that, and neither can you. Everybody has a point, Naruto, everybody. Orochimaru was not a monster from birth, it took time for him to become one. It is easy to say 'there is the line; I will not cross it' now, but what if something were to happen to Hinata or Tenten? What if they were captured and tortured? What if they were killed? Can you say that there is anything you would not do to avenge them?" Jiraiya shook his head. "I know personally how easy it is to start down that road, Naruto, because I have traveled it before. The potential is there, now it comes down to the choices you make."

"That will not be me," he insisted.

"Maybe, maybe not. The fact of the matter is you want power. Power called Hokage, but power nonetheless. As long as you reach for power, there is always the chance that you will fall. You may start doing terrible things in the name of right and justice, and as the saying goes, the path to hell is paved with the best of intentions. We ninja live in a world of grey, a world of shadows. There are times where you will be forced to make decisions and commit acts of evil in the name of the greater good, but the important part is being able to tell when the evil outweighs the good. You are a Jinchuuriki, and whether you realize it or not, that means that your actions and decisions have a much bigger consequences whether or not you ever become Hokage. You must be able to keep yourself in check, because there is nobody else that can."

"I... think I see."

Jiraiya smiled and ruffled Naruto's hair. "You don't, not yet, but you will. And you are to start to grow your hair out."

Naruto blinked at the abrupt shift in topic. "Why?"

"Because you are going to be a sage. All sages grow their hair long, a throwback to the times where sages lived alone on distant mountaintops and caves. It is a symbol of your release of the material, your embrace of the metaphysical."

"I understand."

Oh, and one last thing," the sannin said, reaching in his gi and removing a certain orange book.

"Oh hell no, Ero-sennin. I do not need any of your dirty books lying around in my things for Hinata or Tenten to find."

"Oh can it you brat. You are going to take it and you are going to read it. You have responsibilities now, as a husband, to Hinata and Tenten, and I would not be taking my duties as your teacher seriously if I did not at least attempt to rectify the situation. You are still a virgin right? "

Naruto flushed. "That is none of your business."

"Sure it is," he said with grin. "Anyways, you do want to keep your ladies happy, right?

"Ero-sennin... no. Just no. My relationship with Hinata-chan and Tenten-chan is just fine the way it is now. I do not need you meddling with things and getting me in trouble. So just no."

"Don't think of it as just a dirty book. Think of it as an instruction manual in how to keep your ladies happy. Even though everyone is always down on being a pervert, and I am being serious here, all ladies love a pervert in the bed."

Naruto scowled. The fact of the matter was that he was a thirteen year old adult, in a long-term relationship with two very smoking hot, gorgeous women, one of which he shared a bed with on a regular basis. He was not a eunuch. These two facts were related and resulted in some very... vivid... dreams about what he wanted to do with (and to) them. And in spite of all the flack Naruto gave him for being a pervert, he had no doubt that if Jiraiya said something, he was probably right about it.

Naruto scowled and snatched the book from Jiraiya. "Fine. But there will be hell to pay if I get in trouble because of this."

"We will see. Anyways, it is getting light out. Everyone else should be ready to leave before much longer."

Master and student returned to their camp, where Hinata and Tenten were packing. The tents and sleeping bags had all been done away with, the cookware in the process of the same. Hinata handed him and Jiraiya a plate off rice and eggs each, directing them to sit down on one of logs dragged over to the fire pit for just that purpose. Tenten filled the pit in and erased all signs of camp ever having been there with some earth manipulation, and they were on their way.

Four days passed without incident, but on the fifth day out, as camp was being broken, Jiraiya took Naruto aside. As usual, the ninja and the soldiers had formed two separate camps, but Jiraiya did not lead him to the other camp, but a little ways into the forest. The Acolyte was nowhere to be seen as he and Jiraiya passed the soldiers camp, as were several of the soldiers themselves. The pairs destination was not far, just a couple dozen yards, far enough to be out of eye- and earshot of the others, but well within the clone picket.

It was dark out, the grey predawn light taking a slight green tinge as it filtered through the forest canopy. They found the missing Acolyte and soldiers gathered around a small folding table, a white tablecloth embroidered with a red cross draped over it. There were two white candles lit, a massive tome, gilded and embossed, large enough that it would require two hands to hold open.

The Acolyte nodded neutrally as Jiraiya led Naruto to the rearmost row and sat down. "What is going on here, Ero-sennin?"

"This is Mass, the Acolyte's weekly holy rite. Every week, on Sunday, they hold this ritual to celebrate the death of their god, which they believe came down to Earth in the form of a man and was crucified in order to purge them of their sin, allowing them to enter Heaven when they die."

"Interesting, I suppose, but why did you get me to come see it?"

"Because you are my apprentice, and assuming that you pass your training, when I die you will become the Toad Sage. That means that you need to learn about all the various religions that exist, and this is a good opportunity to introduce you to one of the more important rituals of the Church. Now hush, Mass is about to begin. They will all be speaking in Latin, a dead language that only the Acolytes and their followers use. I don't speak it well, but I know enough to give a rough translation."

It was interesting enough, he supposed, at least at first. Naruto sat and listened as Father Alexander read several passages from the book, which Jiraiya told him was called the Bible, which was from another dead language that translated simply as "The Book." Everyone stood while the Gospel was read, and then sat down for Father Alexander's brief homily.

After the priest's speech, Father Alexander retrieved a golden bowl and chalice filled with thin white wafers and wine respectively from under the cloth and placed on the table where the Bible had been a minute ago as the priest began the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Normally, Naruto had to be within a long arm's reach for the priest's power to bother him, but as the Acolyte gave Mass, the niggling itch at the back of his mind started to grow. But as the priest began praying over bread and wine, all of a sudden all he could hear was the priest's and soldier's chanting Latin.

"Agnus Dei,

qui tollis pecáta mundi;

miserère nobis.

"Ecce Agnus Dei,

ecce qui tollit peccàta mundi.

Beàti qui ad cenam Agni vocàti sunt.

"Dòmine, non sum dignus, ut intres

sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic

verbo et sanàbitur ànima mea."

The voices filled his head, drowning out all other sensation. Clapping his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut did nothing to muffle the increasingly strident chanting. Glancing up at the Acolyte as he picked the wafer out of the bowl and held it up, Naruto became transfixed, seeing something that he could not explain. He saw Father Alexander, standing behind the makeshift altar, holding the simple piece of unleavened bread and praying over it, but there was more. Father Alexander stood in the center of a radiant, persistent aura of light, bright enough that it should have thrown everything else into shadow, but didn't.

He could see the piece of bread as the priest held it, but he saw something else as well, an image, superimposed on the scene. A Man, thin, but not frail, wearing a crown of thorns, bleeding from wounds in his wrists and ankles, as well as a gash in his side. Light spilled from his injuries, but evaporated before it reached the ground. The Man was there, but He wasn't there at the same time, like He was standing just to the side of reality, just behind a veil that Naruto had never realized was there. The Man held his bleeding hand out, and then the wafer became a blinding disk of... it wasn't light, but something more tangible, if light could be concentrated and condensed. And then it _changed__._ Naruto could still see the bread, the circle of wheat, scored to be broken up, but it was also _Him_, as if He and the bread were now one thing, inseparable and indivisible.

Father Alexander took up the chalice, and the same thing happened again. That brilliant, solid light burst forth from the wine, and it _changed_too. The Man was still standing to one side of the altar, but He was also in the bread and wine, He _was_the bread and wine.

Then the Man Looked at him. And then... nothing. A flash of white light, a sense of drifting, disembodiment. Then darkness.

OoOoO

"-To see that Mass thing, and when you come back, he is dead for all we can tell!"

"Naruto-san is perfectly fine, Hyuuga-san. I am not entirely sure, but I think he... saw something that he shouldn't, and just needs time to recover. He shouldn't be unconscious for much longer. I think."

"YOU THINK! What do you mean, _you __think__?"_

"Higurashi-san, I believe that your companion witnessed something that he was not... prepared for. That none of us were prepared for. His vitals are stable, and as far as I can tell, his spirit is as whole as it ever was."

Naruto groaned slightly and stirred. All conversation halted. Hinata and Tenten were on their knees, faces inches from his own, fear and worry plain to see. Both girls fell forward and wrapped him in a hug the moment he opened his eyes.

"This is really starting to get old," Naruto said, glaring at Jiraiya.

"Hey, there was no way I could have seen that coming."

"Still doesn't change the fact that yet again, Naruto-kun went and disappeared with you, and comes back unconscious." Tenten had her arms crossed under her breasts, and he was glad to see that she was not wearing her belt. Tenten took his safety very seriously, and he could easily see her shooting someone in the foot if she did not like the answers she was getting.

"Now, can anyone explain what happened to me?"

"I think I might know, given the timing of your... episode, but I am not sure. Can you recall just what happened, Naruto-san?"

Naruto scrunched his face up in concentration as he thought back. "It was weird. When you got to the part of Mass with the bread and wine-"

"Communion," Father Alexander interrupted.

"When you got to Communion, your voice got really loud, and a guy appeared next to you, but nobody else seemed to be able to see him. He put out his hand, and the bread and wine started glowing... it is hard to describe. It was like he-"

"You witnessed the Transubstantiation." The priest frowned as if he did not believe what he was saying himself. "I believe that you actually witnessed the Transubstantiation."

"Transubstanny-what?"

"Transubstantiation. The holy change of the Eucharist into the Body and the Blood of our Lord. This man that you claim to have seen, what did he look like?"

"He was kind of short, and had a bunch of thorns wrapped around his head, and was bleeding from his hands and his feet, and his side."

"The Stigmata." Father Alexander's frown deepened, his gaze falling further inward. "You witnessed a miracle. I... I think... you may have... actually seen... God. I mean, I had heard about this kind of thing before, but..." Father Alexander trailed off, seemingly losing himself in thought.

"You are saying that I saw your god?"

"By the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and died."

"Did that make any sense to anyone else?" Naruto asked the group at general.

Father Alexander shook his head and refocused on Naruto. "I am sorry. I am just finding all this a little... unexpected."

"Well, can you get your head together long enough to tell us what happened?" Tenten was frowning, and had crossed her arms under her breasts, tapping one foot impatiently.

"Plainly put, you were showing signs of a possession, which given your status as a Jinchuuriki I suppose should not have been surprising, but I have never heard of anyone displaying such a..." The father paused, searching for the right word. "Energetic... reaction to Communion. An aversion to the Crucifix and other holy items is usual for your kind, but I cannot explain why you were able to see the Transubstantiation itself. I will have to investigate this further. There is a repository in the Land of Rivers that I can consult with to determine what went wrong. In the meantime, I think it would be a good idea for you to refrain from attending Mass."

"Sounds fine to me," Naruto replied with a shrug. Naruto had been unconscious for several hours, and it was nearing noon. Hinata had not been sitting at Naruto's side idly while he had been unconscious, having built a small fire and prepared a quick lunch for the group at large, and then the group was on its way.

The next day passed without event, and most of the following as well. It was about two in the afternoon, the group paused for lunch. The four ninja were waiting for the other half of their party to finish their meal, obviously taking longer to prepare and serve food for ten than for four. While Naruto and Hinata cleared away the remains of their lunch, Tenten sat in the dirt, playing with a blown-up balloon.

Hinata had mastered the first stage of the Rasengan training over two weeks ago, and while the other woman had yet to complete the second stage, Tenten was no closer to advancing past the first stage than she had been the day that Naruto had started to teach them. Naruto had offered his assistance several times, but she refused him. Hinata had done it without Naruto giving her a crutch, and she would do so as well. It was just a matter of time, or so she told herself. To be honest though, it was probably going to be quite a long time. Naruto had suggested that she use two hands to try to maintain the dozen or so flows of chakra that were required to pop the balloon, but she refused to do that as well. Naruto and Hinata could each do it with one hand, and so would she. Using a second hand would be cheating, or so it felt to her. If she couldn't do it properly, then she wouldn't do it at all.

It really was no surprise that Hinata had mastered it as quickly as she had, being a Hyuuga and all, but it was just proof of how far Naruto had come since his days in the Academy that he could do so as well. Before graduation, she had known Naruto about as well as anyone else in the class had she supposed, neither she nor Naruto, despite his outward rambunctiousness, had been what anyone would consider social butterflies. There were any number of reasons for Naruto's social segregation, most of them stemming from either his Jinchuuriki status or the fact that Mitarashi Anko was his mother, but the reason for Tenten's social solitude was much simpler. While she had never suffered the kind of treatment that Naruto had been subjected to for most of his life, the fact of the matter was that unlike the vast majority of her classmates, she was an orphan, an Academy student that did not come from one of the established ninja families.

While her parents had never been one-hundred percent behind her decision to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather and enter the Academy, they had never punished her, physically or mentally, for wanting to become a shinobi. Kouseki, whose father had been a ninja, took Tenten's career choice more or less in stride, being Konoha born and bred. Chichi took her daughter's attendance at the Academy a little less evenly, acknowledging that if Tenten wanted to be a shinobi there was nothing that she could do to force Tenten to drop out, that did not mean that she did not miss an opportunity to gently voice her wish that she would choose a less hazardous career.

But at the end of the day, it did not matter how supportive Tenten's parents were, it did not change the fact that she was one of only a handful of orphans in her class, and she simpy could not relate very well with most of her classmates. There was little malice in the way her classmates treated her, the fact simply being that clan heirs and orphans just did not mingle.

Releasing her breath and relaxing, Tenten glared at the little red balloon. By all that was right and just in the world, there should have been no way that such an innocuous object could inspire such hatred. She practiced every single day, when they weren't traveling, eating, sleeping, cleaning her firearms or using the bathroom. Jiraiya had warned her of overexerting herself when she asked Hinata for some salve to rub into her hands to ease the near-constant stinging and aching her digits had acquired. Naruto massaged her hands at night, but it did little to ease the discomfort.

Sighing and starting up again, she channeled chakra to her hands, first splitting it into two flows, picking one and peeling a 'strand' away to make three, then four. She got up to eight before she couldn't add any more, unable to divert the focus needed away from maintaining the flows she already had to peel off another one. She tried anyways, the effort akin to trying to split a strand of cooked spaghetti with cold-deadened fingers. She could almost do it, she just needed to be able to pinch them a little tighter. Scrunching her features up in concentration, she focused on what she perceived to be the fattest of the flows. Pinching and slipping several times, she didn't let her concentration up as she felt the flow she was focusing on start to split. Carefully she did not tighten nor loosen her grip on the strand and she pulled it away. But just as she was going to completely separate the two strands, she felt the others wobble and collapse before she could do anything. Sighing in frustration she shook her hands out. Well, she had gotten a little faster than she had before, almost pulling a ninth strand out from the rest. She would get it, it was just a matter of time. It was time to go in any case, so she deflated the balloon and picked up her pack, following the other into the canopy.

OoOoO

"When is this weather going to _end__?_" Naruto groused as he sat, huddled with the rest of his team as they sat under the protective boughs of a massive sentinel pine eating breakfast. Naruto, Hinata and Tenten all sat together, the two girls each half in his lap, their three coats tied and buttoned together to make a large blanket, shivering lightly in the cold, while the freezing rain continued to come down in a steady drizzle.

The rain was not heavy, but it had not stopped for a significant period of time for three days. And during their brief respites, it was still cold and wet. All their gear had been completely soaked two days ago, and not even Jiraiya had been able to find enough firewood to build a decent cooking fire. They were able to sleep out of the rain at least, thanks to Jiraiya and Tenten, but it had still been a cold, miserable experience.

"Alright everybody, time to get going again," Jiraiya announced, pushing himself to his feet. There was a flurry of sudden motion, everyone wolfing down the lest remnants of their lunch and shouldering packs.

The rain created a steady blanket of noise that drowned out all sounds but theirs and had everyone constantly eying the perimeter, regardless of the fact that there were two Naruto clone pickets ringing the group.

Such constant alertness was wearying, even on Naruto, so when the clone picket reported that there seemed to be a village nearby several hours later, everyone automatically followed Naruto towards the lights.

It was a small village, ringed only by a fifteen foot palisade wall, a single old man, not even armed to man the gate. Initially suspicious, the gateman eventually allowed them into Kagoshima.

Kagoshima was a middle-sized village maybe a dozen miles from the border with Iron, its primary export the iron that was mined from the nearby Mt. Ibuki and possessed of two inns. The larger of the two was situated at the other end of town, naturally, the oil lamp casting a pool of light over the village green. The wooden sign hanging over the door proclaimed the inn to be Wild Wheel, a nearly fallen over wheel on the sign, each of the spokes painted a different color. It was about midafternoon, the exact time uncertain because of the heavy clouds, a few locals at the tables nearest the kitchen.

Practically everyone looked up at the group's entrance, and one of the serving girls stepped into kitchen to retrieve the innkeeper as the door shut behind the group. The man that emerged from the kitchen was a younger man, perhaps a well-preserved thirty, with the girth of a man with a long love affair with food.

The man moved with surprising spryness, giving the group a graceful bow as he greeted them. "Good afternoon honored guests. My name is Basil, and I welcome you to the Wild Wheel. How may I help you this dreary evening?"

"A bath to start with, and a meal to follow," Jiraiya said, removing his heavy cowled cloak. Basil's eyes grew wide at the sight of Jiraiya's horned toad hitai-aite.

"Of course, Shinobi-sama. Our absolute best for you, nothing less."

And their absolute best it was. A swarm of comely maids and what would probably been called footmen in a more expensive hotel, emerged from one of the side hallways at a call from Basil, the group splitting up, men to rooms on one side of the hallways, Tenten and Hinata to one on the other. Jiraiya, Naruto, Father Alexander, and two of the soldiers, Kirishima Date and Sata Eiji, both privates first class followed one of the male attendants into the bath chamber.

It was a warmly lit room, all tile and mirrors, with a large window looking out into the dreary afternoon outside. A large fireplace, big enough to nearly walk into was set into one of the walls, a roaring blaze already lit and heated the air. There were five large bathtubs, gleaming copper, long enough for anyone but Jiraiya to completely lie down in, the rims coming up to the bottom of Naruto's ribs. A pair of three-legged stools sat by each of the tubs, a pair of thick, heavy terrycloth towels and large cake of yellow soap on one of them.

Ara, the bath attendant, turned on the water in each of the tubs, and motioned for them to sit, pulling a shower head from the faucet, allowing them to remove the worst of the grime before settling into the tubs. The tiled floor sloped gently to the center of the room, where a large grate was, allowing the water from the shower heads to drain.

Dropping his clothes in a messy pile by the stool, Naruto was the first one to strip out of his garments and begin washing.

"If your lordship wishes, I can have these taken to the laundry room to be cleaned, and have them back by the time you are finished with your bath."

Ara had already taken Naruto's clothes and begun to fold them properly, setting the dirty clothes on the other stool.

"Yeah, sure," Naruto said, roughly scrubbing his arms with the soap.

"My lords?" Ara asked again, looking to the others who hadn't been quite so speedy in disrobing.

"You know what will happen if anything is amiss when our clothes are returned to us, right?" Jiraiya asked.

"Absolutely, my lord. I will make sure the washwomen know just whose garments they are taking care of."

"Good then. Take our clothes and remain outside until you are called for."

"Absolutely, my lord. If you should require anything before I return-"

"I will stick my head out and give a shout. Now get going."

Ara quickly scooped up the piles of clothing and hurried out the door, Jiraiya locking it after him. "Now," the elderly ninja said, looking around with a gleam in his eye, "this particular bathing room looks secure enough, but I am not so sure about the others. I think that we should do a little scouting, just to make sure that everything is as it should be."

Naruto stopped his scrubbing instantly. "You do realize that the only two women in our group are Hinata and Tenten. And I _know_ that you would never think of peeping on either of them."

Jiraiya turned to Naruto with a look of horror on his face. "You wound me, my dearest protege! To think that I would go and betray my loving pupil's trust like that!"

Naruto gave Jiraiya a flat look. "I trust you only as long as I can see you, Ero-sennin. Especially in a place like this."

"In an inn?" his teacher asked, an expression of confusion painted on his features.

"In a bathing room. And I will alert the staff to the possibility of a pervert in the women's bathing rooms, if necessary."

"You wouldn't."

"I would."

Jiraiya paused. "Sometimes I wonder who your father really was. He would never betray me like this."

Naruto grinned.

OoOoO

Settling into the tubs was a gradual process, Erya, the young woman that had accompanied Hinata and Tenten into the bathing chamber and taken their clothes to be cleaned, making the water a hair below scalding. She returned quickly, and offered to help Tenten was her hair. Hinata had always kept hers short, her father, always thinking of practicality, never approving of Hinata letting her hair grow long enough to tie back. Tenten's hair on the other hand was longer than one might expect, given how she usually kept it tied up in her distinctive buns.

For a while, the only sounds were those of the two women sighing and groaning as the hot water did its work, drawing the chill that both had started to think had become permanently part of their bones out, tightened muscles loosened, and the air went from comfortably warm, to thick with steam and heat.

"Are you really ninja?" Erya asked once the pair had settled themselves into the tubs. She had seated herself on a spare stool by the door, setting their possessions on a shelf to her left.

Tenten, who had folded a towel up and was using it as a pillow, her arms resting on the sides, almost asleep in the incredibly relaxing steaming bathwater, cracked an eye looked over at Hinata and then back at Erya. "Do we look like impostors?"

"If you were really good impostors, how would I tell?"

"Impostors don't have the Byakugan," Hinata said without sitting up or opening her eyes.

Erya's eyes grew wide at that. "You're a Hyuuga?"

That did cause Hinata to open her eyes. "You know about the Byakugan and my clan, but you didn't recognize me as a Hyuuga?"

"Ren tells stories, but it isn't like I have ever seen a shinobi before."

"Ren?" Tenten asked.

"Ah... He is a boy in the village." Erya ducked her gaze, blushing lightly and began twiddling her thumbs. "He is really handsome, and a really good shot."

"So he is pretty popular?" Erya nodded. "Is he a friend?"

"Ah... not really. His father and uncle run the local weapon shop and forge. He doesn't come to the inn very often."

Tenten stared at Erya for a moment before shifting to Hinata.

"Tenten," Hinata drawled.

"Hinata," Tenten replied with a grin.

"Tenten," Hinata warned again.

"Hinata," Tenten said, ignoring the tone in Hinata's voice.

"_Tenten__,_" she repeated.

"Admit it. She's you. A civilian you." Hinata sighed.

Erya scowled. "You just insulted me."

"Ah, not precisely," Hinata said. "It is just that you resemble me as I used to be."

It was clear for the look Erya gave them that she did not understand. Hinata sighed and continued, "Don't worry about it. Tenten was not making fun of you."

"You sure?" she asked uncertainly.

Hinata gave her a smile. "Yes, I am sure."

"Alright then," Erya said, still clearly unsure. However relaxing the baths were, they eventually cooled, and had to be drained.

Jiraiya was the one paying this time, so their rooms were the best the inn had. Lacking sitting rooms, the chambers were still plenty large, complete with walk-in closets. The beds weren't canopied, but the mattresses were high-quality goose-down, as were the comforters. Hinata and Tenten were given adjoining rooms on one side of the hall, Jiraiya and Naruto occupying a pair on the other side.

The Legion soldiers, operating on something of a budget had been quartered on the ground floor, several soldiers to a room, several having been relegated to the stables because of lack of space.

A about halt an hour after they had been shown to their rooms, once the pair had time to dry and dress Tenten poked her head into Hinata's room. "Hey, I am going to go look around town for a bit. Wanna come with?"

"Might as well," Hinata said. "Should be a good idea to get an idea of what this town is like, if nothing else."

"Okay. Let me go get Naruto-kun and we can go." Hinata nodded and turned to grab her shuriken pouch. Locking the door behind her, she left the inn with the other two members of her team. Kagoshima was a middling village of about three thousand persons. The Wild Wheel Inn was on the opposite end of town from the gate they had entered from, the hard-packed dirt road circling around one of the two village greens before heading towards the mines.

There were the usual shops along what seemed to be the main street, instead of names adorning the signs over the doors, symbols of their trade instead. A pair of scissors and a bolt of cloth for the tailor, clogs for the cobbler, hammer and anvil for the blacksmith, a side of beef for the butcher.

"Naruto-kun," Tenten said, staring at one particular shop.

He sighed. "Yes Tenten-chan, we can go into the gun store."

Tenten gave him a peck on the cheek and ran on ahead. Naruto opened his mouth to say something, but Hinata spoke first. "Ichiraku Ramen Bar."

Naruto closed his mouth with a snap. "Point," he admitted. "We should probably go in after her."

"Indeed we should," Hinata concurred.

"And into the deep we go."

Hinata gave him a flat look. "She is not that bad. Certainly no worse than you are about Ichiraku." Naruto just rolled his eyes and entered the shop.

It was impressive. The shop was roughly rectangular, about twenty-five feet wide, and perhaps a little less than twice that long. There was a glass-fronted counter along the right wall, floor to ceiling gun cages behind the counter. The other three walls were filled with shelves, with every firearm-related tool possibly imaginable somewhere on one of the walls. Bags of gunpowder, as well as the individual ingredients. Various types of sights, both open and closed, as well as a wide variety of scopes took up the entire back wall.

As expected, Tenten was standing just inside the door, staring at everything. "I am starting up my own gun shop when we get home. And it is going to look just like this."

"I shall take that as high praise, especially coming from such distinguished guests." The man that approached was heavy with muscle, his slightly egg-shaped head shaved clean crown and jaw. "Kago Genji, at your service," he introduced himself with a smooth bow. "How may I assist you today, Shinobi-sama?"

"We don't need anything, but she may need a moment," Naruto answered, gesturing to Tenten who had started to drift deeper into the store.

"I can see," he said. "If I may inquire, Shinobi-sama, what brings you to our humble town? Surely you are not here to patronize my store?"

"Not originally. We are just passing through on the way to Iron."

"Ah, I see," Genji said, nodding sagely. "Well, if you do not mind, I will go and see if there is anything your companion requires assistance with." Genji gave a brief bow and walked up to Tenten.

Tenten immediately began complimenting Genji on his store, which the man took with only a small grin. Genji introduced himself to Tenten again, seeing as she did not seem to have heard him before. "A true pleasure, Shinobi-sama, to have yourself in my store." Flicking his gaze over her form, he took closer note of her person than he had originally, focusing his attention on Naruto as he had been.

"I see you have a pair of Moses Brothers pistols on your hips. Fine weapons, Moses Brothers firearms are." Bowing slightly and holding out his hands, he offered a smile as he asked, "may I?"

Tenten drew one of her revolvers and handed it to Genji. "Ah, a Self-Defense Engine. Certainly a Frontier style, although I am not sure of the model. Is this silver inlay decorative?"

"No, it's electrum."

Genji furrowed his brow with incomprehension. "I am not sure what that is used for."

"It is chakra-conductive metal. It lets me shoot special bullets."

"Ingenious. Did you get this from the Brothers themselves?"

"Ha, no. Though that would be totally kickass. I was in the Fire capital a while ago, and there was a gunsmith there."

"Hm, that would make sense. The Fire capital is one of a few places where the Brothers' forge rights are waived."

"Forge rights?"

"You own a pair of what are almost certainly unregistered, unlicensed Moses Brothers revolvers and you don't know what forge rights are!" Naruto and Hinata turned away, looking out the bay windows, stifling laughter as Tenten blushed. Neither of them knew what the old man was talking about either, but it was a little funny the way that Tenten blushed and averted her gaze.

"You don't have to make it sound so bad ya know," the brunette growled to no one in particular.

"Basically, there are some companies that have certain types of guns that only they are allowed to manufacture. Anyone caught forging weapons that infringe on a forge right usually loses his whole forge, tools and all. Governments generally have a bad outlook on arms proliferation." Genji shrugged. "Took me almost eight months to get all the permits to run a weapon shop. Certainly doesn't help that I am foreigner either."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Naruto asked from the front of the shop.

"They go over my records with a fine-tooth comb every so often to make sure I am not selling anything to anyone they hold in disfavor. Especially to Lightning."

"You from there?" Hinata asked.

"No. Earth. Nowhere near Iwa, but they keep me under a microscope in any case. I will have to let them know I had you in my shop though. A part of my clientèle are criminals looking for invisible guns, firearms that the government doesn't know about. And the government likes to know about those type of folks."

Both Tenten and Hinata looked to Naruto at that. "I can't say that I am pleased to know that, but we are not sneaking anywhere. And who knows, maybe Iron will get wind of us, so we aren't as much of a surprise when we show up."

"You are headed to Iron?"

"And that is all you can know," Naruto told him.

"Of course, Shinobi-sama. I was just suggesting that you could visit the Boom Town."

The Boom Town?" Tenten asked, an eyebrow cocked. Boom was good. Boom was _always_ good.

"The gun capital of the world. Moses Brothers Arms , Winchester Weapons, the Church's Ordained Ordinance, they are all headquartered in the Boom Town."

"We will see," Naruto said to Tenten's hopeful look.

"Anyways," Genji said, turning his attention to the pistol he still held, broke the gun, checking the motion, and flicking it closed. Checking the sights, he handed it back to Tenten. "As fine a gun as you could wish for, and well maintained."

"Thanks. I have not gotten to put them to as much use as I could have hoped for though. You hear about the Sand/Sound invasion?" Genji nodded. "Well, Konoha gets invaded for the first time in twenty years, and I am in the infirmary. I fired one shot in a whole invasion." Genji chuckled.

"Yes, I can see how that could be... frustrating."

Tenten folded her arms over her chest and frowned. "Yeah." Tenten turned around to look at Genji's stock.

"Anyways, was there something specific you were looking for Shinobi-sama? Or perhaps I could recommend some special modifications, a few of which are my own design."

"Show me your special stock," Tenten told the proprietor, folding her arms and affixing him with a direct stare.

"Excuse me?" Genji asked.

"You said that you get customers that are looking for less-than-legal weapons. You gotta have some stuff that you don't keep out for the normal customers." Genji said nothing. Tenten rolled her eyes. "I am a ninja, Genji-san. I am hardly going to rat you out to the authorities."

"I suppose you wouldn't, at that. If you would follow me this way?" Genji gestured towards a door behind the counter, between two of the gun cages.

There was a narrow hallway, a little wider than Tenten's outstretched arms, made narrower by the filing cabinets and card tables stacked with papers. A bell chimed as Genji held the door open for Tenten. There was a door directly opposite the one one that she had entered through, frosted glass and steel mesh. A shadowy figure, made indistinct by the frosted glass, opened the door, a look of surprise coming over his face. "Oh, a special customer," the other man said, of an age with Genji. "Sanji, this is Higurashi Tenten, a kunoichi from Konoha. Shinobi-sama, this is my brother Kago Sanji. He runs the other side of the shop, where you can find more usual and... unusual weapons."

"Katana, chakram, bull whip, bow, kunai, spear, bo-staff, three part staff, I have them all." He offered a wide grin.

"If you would keep heading back, I can show you to the special stocks."

OoOoO

"I wonder if I should be worried," Naruto said, standing in the now all-but-empty store. "Tenten just disappeared with a strange man into the back of the store, without even saying a word to me."

"I guess she had more important things on her mind," Hinata replied.

"So it would seem," Naruto groused.

"Still, it does give us some time to ourselves. Could use the opportunity to explore the town a little more."

"What about Tenten? Can't just leave her here."

"Leave her a clone. She will probably be busy for a couple of hours anyways."

"Probably," Naruto reluctantly admitted. "So is there anything that you want to do?" he asked as they stepped outside, Hinata pulling one of Naruto's arms over her shoulders, twining their fingers together. She tapped her lips with a finger, thinking for a moment.

"Why don't we see of we can find somewhere private? I can think of a few things that we could do to keep ourselves occupied for a while."

"Sounds good to me," Naruto replied with an easy grin.

As has been stated before, Kagoshima was not an exceptionally large town, so it only took the pair a minute or two to escape into the surrounding wilderness, the town's palisade wall bypassed about as easily as one would expect. This far north, close to the border with Iron, the thick deciduous forest had thinned out to scattered copses of trees, with a sentinel pine or three in the distance.

Once beyond the town walls, it was only another minute before the pair had put enough distance for privacy. Turning to face Hinata, he barely had the time to blink and roll as a chakra-sheathed palm came within an inch of his face. He grinned. "So that is how you want to play it?"

Hinata said nothing, merely smiling in return, her activated Byakugan adding menace that she may or may not have intended to her expression. Naruto backflipped away as Hinata continued her advance, dropping into a leg sweep. Naruto wasted not a moment and came rocketing back towards Hinata as she used her momentum to regain her feet. The Hyuuga heiress warded one, two, three fists away, slowly giving ground to Naruto's relentless assault.

Between the two, Naruto was without a doubt the stronger shinobi, but at the same time, something of a generalist, jack of all trades, master of none, perhaps with a degree of emphasis on ninjutsu, for obvious reasons. With the exception of genjutsu, which he had less affinity for than Lee did for ninjutsu, Naruto had been forced by his mother to acquire what was probably an unusual level of proficiency in the other six disciplines for someone of his age.

Just about the only way that Naruto was ever able to defeat Hinata in hand-to-hand was if he went on the offensive the moment the spar started and did not let up. If Hinata was able to get her feet under her and gain a firm platform, it was pretty much game over. He could tank her needle-point jabs and concussive palm strikes for a while if need be, but once she got her footing, the only way he could put her down was through ninjutsu, usually in the form of shadow clones.

Juking to the left, dodging a fist that would have likely broken her nose had it connected, Hinata threw a palm strike towards his floating ribs, connecting and throwing Naruto back a step. Naruto took the blow in turn, only wincing slightly as he turned sideways and throwing a side kick that very nearly connected. Hinata bent backwards under the kick and rotated out, curling all but two of the fingers on her right hand, quickly tapping three tenketsu on his leg.

Naruto retracted his kick and awkwardly lashed out again, but Hinata easily evaded the clumsy attack. The pair separated for a moment, each gauging the other's defenses.

While Hinata was not considered a genius like her cousin, she was a full-blooded Hyuuga, with everything that entailed. And while Hinata had several ninjutsu under her belt, most elemental techniques of one flavor or another, taijutsu was and always would be her main strength. In a straight-up taijutsu duel, there were not many shinobi around her age that could defeat her without resorting to other skill sets, and Naruto was among them.

Hinata said nothing as Naruto threw his hands together in the clone seal, the single Naruto suddenly flanked by five others. Hinata, having hundreds of hours of practice against Naruto's clone tactics wasted not a moment. Leaping into a forward roll, Hinata dispelled a single clone by driving her feet into the clone's chest, crushing its sternum and destroying it.

The other Narutos had leaped away the moment that Hinata had charged, forming a loose circle around her. Hinata did not waste a moment though. Naruto had proven time and time again that the only way to beat him was to attack and not let up. Rushing forward, Hinata curled her thumbs over her ring and pinkie fingers, lashing out with a barrage of needle-point jabs. The clone blocked her assault with bracers and greaves, buying that single precious moment the others required to reorient and attack.

Ducking under a flying kick from One, Hinata threw a pair of quickly drawn kunai to force Two and Three, the ones that had launched One, to skip a step, giving her time to deal with Four. Four had moved behind her and attempted a grab, slipping one arm under her armpit and the other around her neck. Hinata reached up and broke Four's thumb and his grip, and then shifted hers to shoulder-throw him. He landed well, managing to throw his legs, spinning his body and rolling, so that he was on all fours.

One, Two and Three had all recovered by this time and simultaneously charged. Again, keeping in mind lessons learned from previous spars, Hinata advanced as well. Naruto was stronger and perhaps a little faster than her, but she was far more limber and agile. Slipping past Two's guard, she took a step on his thigh, catching his chin and sliding behind, her other hand on the back of his head forcing it to continue to rotate, wrapping her legs around his torso, and then whipping her hands around, snapping Two's neck. One foot at the small of his back flipped her away as he burst into smoke.

That caused the remaining four Narutos to exchange glances and nods, and then it was all she could do to stay on her feet. While Hinata was fairly fast, speed being one of the things that Anko had drilled them in extensively, Naruto was much faster. One of the problems with his Shadow Clone Technique was that all his clones thought with a single mind, and that translated into uncanny coordination at times. He was holding back of course, not wishing to do any serious damage to her, but Hinata was still having a hard time keeping up without donning her Garments of the Dead.

Naruto was not moving at his full speed, obviously, nor was he hitting with full force, but he was certainly pushing Hinata to her limits, without accessing her full arsenal. Since Naruto had broken out his shadow clones, when the four Naruto's each threw a brace of shuriken at her, her hands flicked through three seals and announced her technique.

"Lightning Release: Repulsion!" she cried as she thrust both her hands out, the shuriken that the Narutos had thrown sent tumbling back the way that they had been thrown. They were easily dodged, not that she had expected to hit with them, but it did force the Narutos to divert their charge slightly.

Hinata took advantage of the disruption, crying out "Hyuuga Hidden Art: Yin Fist!" The Narutos all grinned at the same time, hearing Hinata announce a new technique. Hinata's wind up was rather reminiscent of her Eight Trigrams: Sixty-Four Palms technique, chakra faintly outlining her form, making the original blink at the strange double vision. Hinata was shrouded in the faintest aura, slightly more concentrated around her hands, of a healthy, natural blue. At the same time, her chakra seemed to trail her hands, leaving ghostly afterimages of the deepest black. It did not obscure vision, nor did they last long, just a second or so, but it was strange.

Other than the circular wind-up, the similarity to the Sixty-Four Palms Technique ended there. Striking with needle point jabs, her attacks did not just close off tenketsu, it deadened where it simply did not destroy clones entirely. Shadow clones where the most physically fragile solid clones, but they could usually take at least two or three hits before dispelling. Hinata suddenly became a whirlwind of destruction, her dancing limbs leaving trails of ghostly cold to accompany the ethereal darkness, draining the life out of anything it touched. Even the manner in which the technique killed clones was unusual, in that it made his clones shudder and make a face a moment before they exploded. There was no concussive or thermal force behind the explosions unlike his Great Shadow Clone Explosion technique, but it was certainly surprising, if the expression the original Naruto wore was anything to go by.

Naruto ended the spar just a few minutes later, after Hinata had decisively proved that Naruto's clones couldn't do anything but die against Hinata's Yin Fist while sparring.

"So, the Yin Fist, eh?" Naruto said, barely winded while Hinata was almost doubled over, panting and sweating despite the chill. "Does that mean what I think it means? And that you also have a Yang Fist?"

"Yes, I can split my chakra, and yes I do have a Yang Fist, but it isn't something that I could use against you in a spar."

"Why not?"

"Let's say it is not exactly... lethal. In fact it is pretty much the complete opposite." That caught Naruto's interest, expressed by way of a cocked eyebrow.

"That sounds... intriguing. Exactly how un-lethal is it?"

"This un-lethal." Hinata rolled up the sleeve on her jacket, baring her bicep and focusing her gaze on her other hand. It started glowing blue and ghostly white, radiating a heat that seemed twice as hot in contrast to the hellish cold that her Yin Fist had given off. Quickly tapping several tenketsu on her arm, Naruto blinked in surprise when it swelled with hard, sculpted muscle. Hinata took several steps over to a nearby tree and struck three times.

Naruto leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, impressed. Her punches were as fast as anything she had ever thrown, but with hardly any effort, or so it seemed. And that wasn't even counting the fact that her strikes had left fist deep holes in the trunk, something that was more his speed than hers. She was all lithe, limber speed, brute strength was his shtick.

His impressed expression quickly gave way to one of worry when he saw Hinata wince and tap her tenketsu again, cradling her arm.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," she said, not-quite-pain in her voice. "Kinda hurts when I do that. Strains the muscles."

"Ah. Is that something that you can do to someone else, or only yourself?"

"Theoretically, I can do it to anyone, but it can do serious damage if the muscles aren't used to that kind of strain. You could probably handle it better than I can."

"Yeah, probably," he agreed. "Can you do anything else with your Yang Fist?"

"Like?"

"Make someone move faster, or damage-proof?"

"Not separately, at least not yet. You know how the body doesn't use 100 percent of its total ability? So it doesn't damage itself?" Naruto nodded. "Well I can force it to override those safeties, for a while at least. The body can only handle the strain to a certain point though, and if I use the technique for too long, it will do permanent damage."

"So it is something of a double-edged sword then." Hinata nodded. "Still, it sounds like a very useful technique, regardless of the cost. I will definitely want you to try it on me and maybe Tenten eventually. Being able to suddenly get stronger and faster in the middle of a fight is one hell of an ace." The thought of using her Yang Fist on Naruto or Tenten seemed to make her uneasy, but Naruto didn't seem to notice, eyes unfocused and arms in a thinking pose, one hand stroking his chin. A thought stuck him and he looked back at Hinata.

"Can you use it on someone to make them heal really fast? Like kick their natural healing ability into overdrive?"

Hinata frowned. "Um... I am not sure." Hinata paused and closed her eyes in concentration, bringing up everything that she had read in the Dim Mak scroll and had been taught about chakra and the Gentle Fist. "Actually, maybe," she said slowly after a full minute. "You know about how the Gentle Fist works, right? And how chakra flows through the Chakra Pathway System, and how it can be stopped by targeting the tenketsu?"

"I know I am not exactly the brainiest guy around, but I am not completely retarded. It is not like I can't remember anything that isn't directly related to fighting."

Hinata blushed and ducked her gaze at Naruto's slightly accusing and insulted tone. "Ah, sorry... Anyways, the technique works by... supercharging specific tenketsu with yang chakra, forcing the muscles to bypass the built-in limiters the body has to perform at peak efficiency and power. Theoretically, it should be possible to focus or channel that energy into healing the body, but I don't know exactly how to do that."

"Doesn't that scroll your dad gave you say anything about it?"

Hinata shook her head. "Not the parts that I have read yet, and the scroll said to never read ahead."

"That is somewhat disappointing, but whatever." He shrugged. "You will get to it eventually."

"Maybe," Hinata replied with a small smile. "Assuming that it is possible." Hinata paused for a moment, thinking. "And assuming that I can do it without harming you either."

"Bah, the fox can take care of whatever damage you do to me. There hasn't been anything yet that can keep me down."

Hinata shook her head. "That is not what I am talking about. All chakra is made of both yin chakra and yang chakra. Using the Yang Fist on you is essentially injecting you with pure yang chakra. A healthy body has yin and yang in equal proportions, and when the proportions become unequal, the body cannot handle it and starts to show signs, and that is usually why people get sick. I can use the Yang Fist on myself because it is my own chakra, and the Yin Fist because it only uses tiny amounts. You should be able to handle the levels of yang chakra that I would be using on you, but I _am_ injecting pure yang chakra into you, and the balance is a delicate thing. It is definitely something that Jiraiya-sama needs to be present for, at least the first time, until we know if there are any aftereffects."

"Well, I suppose there is no harm in being safe," Naruto said.

"And do not expect me to use it on you or Tenten without testing it in front of Jiraiya-sama first either." Hinata was scowling, irritated at Naruto's usual lack of care about his well-being."

"Relax, Hinata-chan." Naruto held up his hands in a defensive position, an easy smile curving his lips. "I know it could be dangerous. I wasn't arguing with you."

"Good," his wife said. "As long as you know it."

"Hey, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I learned a long time ago not to make you mad. Or Tenten. Or Mom. How about we leave it at women in general?"

Hinata smile. "That sounds like a good idea."

"So you ready for round two?"

Hinata took a bracing breath, and assumed her stance.

OoOoO

"About time you two got back," Jiraiya said without looking up from his game of shogi. It was late, past eleven by the polished mantel clock. Naruto and Hinata looked a little more worn than they had been when they had left the inn several hours ago, as they should, but they weren't hanging off each other either.

"Sorry, was doing some training and sorta lost track of time."

"I bet you did," Jiraiya said, with a knowing smirk.

The pair blushed. "NOT LIKE THAT!" Naruto shouted, followed by a quieter "stupid pervert."

"Anyways, Tenten come in yet?"

"Yeah, a while ago. And you are gonna love what she got at that gun shop."

"Should I be concerned?"

"Only a little." Naruto gave Hinata a look and headed towards the stairs. The clone that Naruto had left at the gun shop was sitting on the bed, twiddling its thumbs, wearing a rather worrying worried expression. At the sight of the original, the clone let out a sigh of relief, and dispelled itself. Naruto took a second to scan the memories, before adopting a worried expression himself.

"Oh dear."

"Oh cut it out. I already know enough not to blow myself up. Or you, unless I want to." Tenten was sitting at the desk, lamp on, hunched over something.

"Oh dear?" Hinata asked querulously.

Tenten spun in her chair, a wide grin adorning her face and tossed something at Hinata. It was roughly oval, textured, and weightier than it looked. "I got grenades."

Hinata looked to Naruto. "Think explosive tags for civilians. Except they can be lobbed."

"Oh dear was right."

Tenten scowled and crossed her arms. "You know, I don't think this is really fair. Naruto has the fox, you got that Fist of Death thing, and what do I got?" Naruto and Hinata exchanged looks, but didn't get the chance to say anything. "Naruto, you are the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki, and that means that Akatsuki is coming after you. They already have once, even if it seems to have mostly been because you were at the right place at the right time, and once they get wind of this plan of yours, and it is only a matter of time, the next time they come after you, they will not be pulling any punches.

"The fact of the matter is that I am the weak link in this team. When it comes time to face them, you can whip out the Kyuubi, and if your Dim Mak is half as deadly as it is made out to be Hinata-chan, then there is nothing out there, Akatsuki or otherwise, that you have to worry about not being strong enough to handle. But me? Yeah, I have my zanpakuto, and my guns, and the Rasengan, if I can ever get it to work, but other than that? What do I have that can be used against an S-rank missing-nin?"

"Ah, Tenten-chan-"

"And don't feed me any bullshit about you two looking after me in a fight. That is nothing but retarded. With the caliber of enemy that we are going to have to face, you cannot afford to have to split your attention between fighting and looking after me. I am not like you two; I don't have any secret power to draw on in emergencies, no bloodline or family technique. I come from a family that could be described as part-time military, and that is putting it kindly. My family has never been anything but middle class, sometimes with a decade or more going by without ever having someone even enter the Academy, much less graduate. My dead grandfather is one of the most well-known Higurashi shinobi ever, one of less than a handful that ever made jounin, but try to see if anyone who did not know him personally remembers him.

"I know you love me Naruto-kun, but I have to be able to earn my place on this team. Unlike you two, I know that I will never be someone who will be able to fight on the level of these guys, but I will take any tools I can get my hands on that let me defend myself a little bit better."

Naruto did not say anything immediately, instead giving Hinata a glance, which she responded to with a nod, and left the room.

Naruto knelt down in from of the brunette, taking her hands into his. "Tenten-chan, I have no idea where this is coming from, but I promise you, neither Hinata nor I have ever thought you were a burden."

"I know that, Naruto-kun, but..." Tenten paused for a moment, trying to find the right words to express her thoughts. "Naruto, what does this mean to you?" she asked, holding up her left hand and wiggling her engagement ring with her thumb.

"Ah... That you are my fiancée, and that we are going to be married." The shift seemed to put Naruto back on his heel, unsure where Tenten was going with her question.

"It means, Naruto, that we are partners. That no matter what, for good times and bad, that we are two people with one life. That we share our burdens, our pains, our joys with each other. I am your partner, your teammate, your friend, and some day, sooner rather than later hopefully, your wife. Your troubles are my troubles, and your fights are my fights. I do not want to be, can not be the damsel in distress that you have to come rescue. I _need_ to be able to fight on my own, and if I can't beat any of these Akatsuki guys, at least not need to be rescued.

"Naruto, you and Hinata exist on a different plane of reality than I do. I was born to a middle-class family, without wealth, power or prestige. You were born to be Hokage, born to rule. In another age, you would have been a king. And Hinata would be your queen. Me? I am nobody. You have the kind of strength and willpower that I can only dream of." Tenten saw the confusion and maybe a little anger building in his eyes and asked another question. "Tell me, when you were attacked and almost kidnapped by Itachi and Kisame, what was your first reaction?"

"My first reaction? Well, I was angry I guess."

"And why were you angry?"

"Because..."

"Because you were not strong enough to beat them?" Tenten interrupted. Naruto nodded. "Terror would have been my first reaction. The thought of Itachi freaking Clan-killer and the man that is said to be a human Bijuu coming after me? And seven more as strong, if not stronger behind them? It makes me want to find the deepest, darkest hole I can and pull it in after me. But you? You just get mad. You want to take them head on, to go to the other Jinchuuriki and beat them at their own game. That is not normal, at least my kind of normal. Do you want to know what my nightmares are about?" Naruto nodded silently. "They are about being used against you. Of being captured and tortured, then being brought out and told that I will be killed, unless you surrender. And you do. That is what terrifies me, Naruto. That is why I have to grab every tool, every weapon, every advantage that I can get my hands on so that if that day comes, if I am ever captured, I will make them pay in blood."

"Tenten..." Naruto said slowly.

"It is okay, Naruto. This is not something that I came to realize last night. I may not necessarily like it, but I can hardly berate you two for being stronger than me."

"Tenten, I don't know what to say. I have never consciously done anything to make you feel like you do not deserve to be on this team. And I do not just say that because of us. Okay, you may not be the best at hand-to-hand combat or be the fastest one on our team, but there is nobody in Konoha who is deadlier than you at range. Just because you can't go toe-to-toe with the likes of Itachi and Kisame in no way means that you too weak to be on our team. Honestly, the thought of having to fight Itachi scares me too. He would have beaten me like a red-headed stepchild if Jiraiya had not stepped in right when he did, and I rather doubt that Hinata would do much better either. Okay, yeah I am the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki, but that means diddly if I can't control it. Which I can't. So take this inferiority bullshit of yours and stuff it. You have as much right as Hinata or I do to be on this team, and I do not ever want to hear you say otherwise ever again. Am I clear?"

Tenten gave him a smile. "Yeah. I get it. But keep in mind that I am a woman, and that means that I reserve the right to be insecure and maybe a little nutty at times."

"Be as crazy as you want, just don't ever think that you have not earned the right to be on this team. Got it?"

Tenten offered Naruto a smile and leaned forward to press her forehead to his. "Yeah, sure. I got it."

"Good. Now it is pretty late so why don't you put your toys away and come to bed."

"Sounds like a good idea."

OoOoO

A/N: Okay, this took way too long to get out, but on the up side, it is nearly twice the length of my usual chapters. I was struggling a lot with most of the Tenten-centric scenes, and trying to balance what I wanted to say, without overdoing it. Not sure how successful I was, but I am sure I will get a couple of flames if I did go overboard.


	7. Iron

**Chapter 7: Iron.**

**A/N: A lot of expository dialogue/infodumping here, making this the second longest chapter I have written for SnN. I think I am pretty much done with the not immediately pertinent worldbuilding for the time being though.**

"You three about ready to go?"

"As soon as we are done here and the Legion soldiers are ready to."

The common room inn was mostly full, about half the soldiers seated at the tables eating breakfast as Naruto, Hinata and Tenten were doing.

"Well we are settled up here, so we can leave any time."

Naruto picked up his plate and scraped the rest of his eggs into his mouth. "Well, I am done."

"Me too," Tenten chorused, quickly followed by Hinata. The six soldiers that were still eating all set down their food and followed Naruto and the rest of the ninja out. Sergeant Kurosaki and Father Alexander were waiting out by the stables, overseeing the preparation of the horses.

"How long until you are ready," Naruto asked from the doorway.

"Just finishing up, sir," Kurosaki said from his horse's side. His hands moved over his horse with smooth precision, tightening and adjusting straps with quick, sure motions. Giving the girth strap one last tug, Sergeant Kurosaki put his foot into the stirrup and mounted his horse, leading the other soldiers out of the barn and into the sunlight.

Ten minutes later and Kagoshima was an increasingly small and increasingly indistinct shape in the rear view. It a little over a day to reach the Iron-Fire border, and about the same amount of time for Naruto to discover that the Hidden Villages did not have a monopoly on defensive land formations. Almost from the moment Naruto and his group crossed into Iron, the weather went from uncomfortably chilly to below zero, combined with the almost unnatural regularity of the nearly symmetrical rock outcroppings slowed their pace somewhat, constantly having to zigzag back and forth around the conical outcroppings and cut paths through slog through snow that came up to the horses chests at times with their various elemental techniques.

Iron was not a large country, and only possessed a handful of castles, Mitsudara being one of the most unusual and important ones in the country. Built in the centuries before the cataclysmic Third World War, it was one of the oldest structures in the world, built in the ancient way, in the manner that the throne room of the Last Redoubt imitated. The first of the castle's oddities lay in its location and construction. Sitting within sight of and nearly in the shadow of the Three Wolves, a massive curling rock formation that jutted several hundred meters above Iron's broken terrain, Mitsudara Castle sat on the plateau left behind when the top half of the formation had been removed. If the sheer unscalability of the lower half of the outcropping was not enough of a deterrent for would-be aggressors, the ascent to the castle was heavily fortified, nearly a dozen guardhouses built into the stone of the outcropping, demarcating the only path leading up to the top.

The moment Naruto and his group came within sight of the guardhouse standing at the base of the outcropping, over a dozen armored Iron soldiers piled out into the open air, forming a defensive line between the foreigners and the gate. The queue of civilians dissolved instantly, everyone scrambling out of the way of the soldiers.

The guards were attired in a similar manner as the Fire Legion soldiers were, but in shades of grey and black instead of blue. They wore unpolished but unmarred grey breastplates over their woolen longcoats, the kanji for Iron in a black circle set into the center, uncrested kabutos in the same dull color on their heads. On their right shoulders was a metal badge in the shape of a half-raised portcullis in an arch.

One of the soldiers stepped out of the line, this one carrying his Iron kanji crested helmet under one arm. "I am the gate captain. Who are you and what is your purpose here in Iron?"

"My name is Hyuuga Naruto of Konohagakure, accompanied by Kyushu Jiraiya of the Sannin. I have come to speak to the Governor-General, Mifune."

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say because that only made the soldiers unlimber their firearms. That made Naruto a little nervous, having almost thirty guns aimed in his general direction. Naruto was one of the fastest shinobi of his generation, but he couldn't dodge bullets, not at that range, and not unless he donned his Garments of the Dead, and that would take a moment longer than it would take him to get shot.

The moment the Iron guards raised their weapons everyone did the sensible thing and raised their hands, well away from their own and tried to look as unthreatening as possible. Of course, that was a little easier said than done, given it was hard to mistake the man at Naruto's side for anybody other than Jiraiya and backed by a dozen soldiers of his own. "Captain, I am on a diplomatic mission from Konoha, sanctioned by the Hokage and the Fire Daimyo himself. I am going to slowly reach into my coat and remove my credentials." Naruto did as he said; making sure the guards saw the corner of the brown diplomatic envelope as he pulled it out, pinching the corner by his thumb and forefinger, the other finger spread wide. The gate captain came forward to accept the envelope before retreating behind his men to read the contents. Team Shinigami waited, but the gate captain just ordered his soldiers to lower their weapons as he walked through the line and offered Naruto the envelope back.

"You will be allowed entry, but you must submit to a search and surrender any weapons other than your sidearms, which will be peace-tied. While in Mitsudara Town, you will carry your honor weapons with you at all times and you will submit them for inspection at the request of any law enforcement official. If at any time your peace-ties are discovered to be broken, you and your cohorts will be arrested on the spot and detained until an investigation has been conducted to discover whether or not you have committed any other crimes, followed by immediate deportation. Is there anything you do not understand?"

Naruto looked to his companions, and then shook his head at the guard captain when none of them signaled a negative. The guard captain turned away and flicked a hand at Naruto, gesturing for them to follow. The guardhouse was sizable, designed as a mantrap. Everyone was brought into the first room, designed as a waiting area for processing. Naruto's group was taken through the only other door in the room in groups of three, excepting Hinata and Tenten who were taken in together.

Naruto and a pair of soldiers were brought through first. There was a table set in the middle of the second area, spanning most of the room with several soldiers on the other side. Three guards came around the table and made the trio strip down to their underwear, making sure that nobody had any concealed weapons. Naruto did, of course, but he gave them up without a fuss.

"We are going to have to search all your belongings now, including your luggage scrolls. You may watch, but there may be some items that you will not be allowed to bring into the city. You will be given a receipt for anything confiscated and will only be returned when you leave. Now, if you will please place your belongings on the table to be inspected."

The statement was phrased like a question but his tone made it clear that it was not. Setting his scroll on the table, he deftly untied the thin leather strips and unrolled it with a flick of his wrist, quickly popping all the seals for inspection. As the captain had said, they really did not seem interested in anything that could not be used to kill someone. They only flipped books open or unfurled scrolls to make sure that they were not concealing any other weapons.

There was a small pile of wire, shuriken, senbon and kunai set in a cardboard box labeled with his name and the date. All his other belongings were repacked and his scroll handed back to him. "You may select one weapon as your honor weapon, limited to melee blades or sealed firearms."

Naruto did not say anything, just setting his zanpakuto on the table before the guard captain. One of the other guards picked it up, removing a small box from under the table and setting by Naruto's sword. There was a roll of shiny red wire in the box, as well as a lump of green wax. A small pool of wax was melted onto the flat of Kitsune's pommel over the end of the red wire. It was given a moment to solidify, and then quickly wrapped around the hilt, guard and sheath in a complex web. The wire was snipped and another small puddle of wax was melted over the other end. The wire was thin, but strong looking, with a shiny, glittering thread running through it.

Once the searches were done, Naruto and the two were escorted to the third chamber, where they passed through another doorway that led to a narrow sloping passage, curling one hundred eighty degrees to deposit them on a shelf set into the side of the stone thirty feet above the ground.

It took another forty-five minutes to clear the rest of Naruto's group, Jiraiya coming out last along with Tenten, Hinata and the guard captain. The captain handed a piece of paper to Jiraiya.

"Be at this location before sundown. If you are not, a search party will be organized and you will not like the consequences when you are found. Iron is and will stay a neutral party in all shinobi affairs. Anything done to threaten that neutrality will be severely punished. Do not cause an incident and your stay here shall be a pleasant one."

Jiraiya gave the guard captain a solemn nod. "We will do our best to avoid disturbing the peace, Thank you for your hospitality."

"Thank you for your hospitality?" Naruto asked when they began their ascent. "That has to be the least hospitable greeting that I have ever seen!"

"That wasn't all that bad, all things considering. Just be glad they allowed us entrance at all. As I have told you before, we are just about the samurais least favorite people, and we are foreigners to boot. Iron considers all ninja liars, thieves and cheats, which is what we are for the most part, so you shouldn't be surprised when we are treated like criminals."

"I guess that makes sense," Naruto said slowly. "I had not really thought about it from their point of view."

"This is an important lesson for you then, apprentice. As I have told you before, whether or not you become Hokage, whether or not you succeed me as the Toad Sage, you will always be a person of power, and by extension, influence. As a result, the ability to tell truth from fiction, to see underneath the underneath, to understand the other side's point of view will be your most important skills, even more if you do become Hokage. Truthfully, your position as Konoha chunin is the least important of your titles." It took half an hour for the group to reach the top, breezing through all the other guardhouses built into the ascent and finally get their first look at Mitsudara Castle.

Compared to the metropolitan Urashima Military City, the castle town was hardly impressive, occupying approximately two-thirds of the plateau, if well defended. The castle itself did not appear to be as large as its importance might suggest, less than ten stories tall judging by the two jutting, curled eaves that was all that could be seen from outside the first of the three stone walls that protected the town. Each gave every indication that they had been carved from the living stone, lacking anything in the way of a join, crease or crack.

The outermost wall was about thirty feet tall possessing a single archway with a half-raised portcullis to allow admittance. A wooded bridge connected to the second way by thick chains was lowered over a twenty-foot deep dry moat, lined with a veritable thicket of wicked spikes. The guards manning the gate waved them through almost immediately, forgoing any sort of inspection more detailed than a quick tug on everyone's honor weapons.

If there was one thing Mitsudara Town and UMC shared, it was the bustle. While Mitsudara Town had a third of the population of UMC at best, it was undoubtedly far more diverse. Sun-dark nomads from Sand, Fire caravan traders with their familiar accents from home, quick-talking, pale-faced citizens from Water making the night-skinned Lightning men look all the darker in comparison. And surprisingly enough, they were not the only shinobi in the city either. Perhaps it shouldn't have been in hindsight, but Naruto blinked in surprise and stared when he saw a pair of shinobi, one with a Grass hitai-aite and one with a Waterfall one walking side-by-side, everyone watched over by the town guards that patrolled the streets in force. "As a neutral nation-state, many organizations and even other countries use Iron as a safe zone, an area where they can conduct business without having to worry about being ambushed or ripped off. As long as nobody does anything that endangers Iron's peace or neutrality, they generally don't care what business people come to conduct. The only caveat to that is they take a very dim view on anything they consider deceitful or dishonest, and Iron has few reservations on deporting anyone they deem to be breaking their codes of conduct, so you can generally trust whatever it is the other guy is telling you."

"Are they so dangerous?" Tenten asked.

"Let me just say that there is a very good reason why the shinobi nations leave Iron way the hell alone and the samurai rule the known world."

"I think we will take that into consideration," Hinata said. "So this Mifune would be one scary guy then?"

"Easily better than me."

Naruto did not say anything to that, but neither Hinata nor Tenten missed his inward stare. Nobody said anything, the gravity of Jiraiya's tone forestalling speech. "Yeah, that might actually work, but..."

"Oh no, Naruto-kun. No no no."

"Don't even think about it," Hinata said on the heels of Tenten's words. "Don't even think about trying to pick a fight with or start a duel with him."

"You don't even know what I was thinking," Naruto protested.

"We both know you well enough by now to know exactly what you are thinking," Hinata replied flatly.

"But the thing is, I think it would actually work. 'Cause the way that I figure it, the samurai have to have something, something or a skill, on top of the chakra cocoon that trumps our ninjutsu, especially given how you were making the toad's kinjutsu out to be the next best thing since sliced bread. And since speed is king-"

"Naruto, I am dead serious when I say do not try to start anything with Mifune. He is not Urashima. Get into a fight with him and he will not go easy on you. Mifune is the leader of Iron, with all that it entails and implies. I know the man, and I have worked with him before, but that by no means that he will do the same with you. On the other hand, he is a samurai so deal with him like you did with Urashima and you should do okay. Just don't do anything that he would consider dishonest or disrespectful."

"That could be a problem," Hinata snarked.

"Okay," Naruto said stopping in his tracks. "You know, that was funny back in the Academy and back in Konoha for the first couple of months but by now I think I have proven that I can take things seriously when I need to be."

"Sorry Naruto-kun," Hinata apologized immediately. Naruto grunted and continued walking but his frowned remained.

"Anyway," Jiraiya continued, "it is always 'my lord' or 'sir.' Give Mifune the same speech you gave Urashima and I think you should have a good chance of convincing him to support your plan. I think you should have a good chance of convincing him to support your plan, being all for peace and love as he is. That being said, he is going to want to know every single detail of your grand plan, and I guarantee that he is going to want to be on the short list for information, and on your group when the time comes. And one last thing- do not lie to him, about anything, ever. Mifune is the least trusting, most paranoid son-of-a-bitch I know. Given who he is, and who we are asking what we are, he is going to assume that every word out of your mouth is a lie. He is the closest thing to a human lie detector I have ever encountered. At the same time, Iron has the most extensive network of eyes-and-ears in the world. Being just about the only country without a Hidden Village, they have a very vested interest in the goings-on of the shinobi nations as you might well imagine. Iron, being what you could probably describe as the only truly neutral nation also acts as something of an information broker, if the price is right, and the consequences aren't too high.

"Keeping that in mind, there is every likelihood that Iron's intelligence branch already has a dossier on you and Mifune will memorize every scrap of information they have on you when he learns of our arrival. So yet another reason not to lie to him, if you needed one."

"Alright, Nothing but straight brutal honesty from me."

"And no lies of omission either. You need Mifune's support. Do not give him the slightest reason to suspect our reason for coming to him. If he believes that there is some other reason for our presence, that we might be a threat to Iron, he will not hesitate to deny your request and most likely try to imprison us."

"Alright, alright, I get it. Don't lie, don't annoy, and don't do anything that may make him suspicious. So how long do you think we are going to have to wait this time?"

"Not long. I don't come around that often, so I am sure that Mifune will want to know what I am doing his country again."

Naruto narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "You weren't dodging the cops by any chance, were you? And just how often do you come around?"

"It has been about a year or so and I left of good terms with the law."

"You sure about that?"

"You know how you said that you were tired of Tenten and Hinata constantly giving you crap for being such a knucklehead? Well I could say much the same from you. I am a sage and one of the Sannin after all."

"I suppose you have a point. Still, you have to admit you are who you are."

"And who exactly am I? Other than a ladies' man and a pervert?" How long have you known me? Less than a year. And how many times have you known me to get into trouble that I could not quickly or easily extricate myself from? Never."

"Well you said that Iron is the only neutral party. Stands to reason that this would be a good place to conduct business that you don't want anyone knowing about. And given what you have told us about Iron and its stance on anything ninja, I could certainly see you catching heat for it."

"Me? Get caught? Preposterous. There is a reason why I am one of the Three."

"You did say that Iron has the best spy network out there. Logic would dictate their counter-intelligence department is pretty good too." Naruto shrugged. "Hey, nobody is perfect. I can't imagine that there has never been a time where you have been outsmarted or outplayed?"

"Been a long time since anyone has been good enough to do that." Jiraiya paused, folding his arms and closing his eyes. "But I am not arrogant enough to say there is no one out there who can do it. Bah! What the hell am I saying? Of course there is no way someone could do that to me."

"Nuh-uh. You admitted it was possible. No take-backsies."

"You know what? This conversation is over."

"You can't just declare a conversation to be over just because it isn't going the way you would like."

"Pretty sure I can, and pretty sure I am. Now we need to find this place that we are supposed to be staying at." Jiraiya looked at the paper that the guard captain had given him. "This way," he said after a moment. "It has been a while, but I think I know where this place is." Jiraiya led the group in near silence for twenty minutes until he stopped in front of a four-story building of plain dressed grey stone. There was a sign set into the stone above the steel-banded wooden door proclaiming it to be the Wayfarers Rest.

Double-checking the paper, Jiraiya gave a decisive nod and pushed the door open. The interior of the Wayfarers Rest was huge, almost to the point of seeming larger on the inside than the out, and nicely appointed. There wasn't any gilt or silvering apparent, but the furniture was well made without being flamboyantly so. The three chandeliers hanging above were large without dominating the room, the crystals throwing light towards the front of the room.

A butler of some sort was waiting by a little podium set to one side of the door stepped in front of the group, holding his hand out. "If you will please wait for a moment," the man said, before walking off into a set of double doors in the opposite wall forty yards away, not waiting for a reply.

Naruto, Hinata and Tenten took the opportunity to examine their surroundings in more detail. As had been noted before, the room they had entered was finely decorated without being lavish. Naruto found it to be somewhere between the common room of an inn and the lobby of an upscale hotel. The entrance was set in the center of the front wall, which was paneled in some pale, golden wood with dark grains. The left side of the room was set up in a more business setting, comfortable-looking armchairs, loveseats and couches arranged in small circles around low coffee tables, enough space between each circle combined with the low-volume jazzy soft-rock that was playing that it would be difficult to hear any particular conversation without being obvious about it. The bar that stretched the left half of the room was very well stocked, six shelves of expensive-looking liquors and wines, the levers for over a dozen kinds of draft beer visible.

The right side of the hotel was a restaurant. There were high-walled booths set along the wall, tables ranging in size from only able to seat two for an intimate meal to being able to seat a dozen or more. It took less than a minute to peruse the room and only a little longer to for the maître to return. He was accompanied by a man dressed to be either the owner or a manager of some sort, flanked by three more maître. The manager stopped in front of Naruto's group and bowed low, his folded hands over his knees. "Jiraiya-sama, Hyuuga-sama, Hyuuga-sama, my name is Shugo. Please allow me to welcome you to the Wayfarer's Rest. I am sorry, but I must request for you to submit your passports and honor weapons for inspection."

Shugo gave the four men behind him a slight wave of his hand and why stepped forward, quickly checking that they all had the appropriate stamps in their travel books and that their weapons were still tied. The suites that the manager led the four ninja to were more than a little reminiscent of the hotel that they had stayed in Kiri. There were three rooms, each with a sitting room decorated in the same manner the rest of the hotel had been, with a large queen-sized bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by dark furniture.

"You know, this is a pretty nice place. Kind of surprised that they told us to come here, given the general attitude Iron holds us in."

"Well, Jiraiya says that he does come here every so often, so I would not be surprised if they know him, or something."

"Maybe," Tenten temporized. "Still, nice digs. Wonder how long we are going to be here this time."

"Not long, hopefully. The sooner we can get out of here, the better I will feel."

"I am with you, Hinata-chan. Jiraiya said that this Mifune guy will want to see us soon, so I am hoping that we will be here a couple of days. Pretty much anything less than a week would be ideal."

"A week would be very much on the outside, unless you really fuck your meeting up," Jiraiya said, entering the sitting room with a bottle of amber liquor.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, sensei," Naruto said sourly.

"Hey, I wasn't commenting on your chances of failure, only the consequences. Anyways, I am heading out to try to arrange that meeting. You guys can go out and check the town out if you want, but just be careful not to get into trouble. Would be a little awkward having to bail any of you out when you are supposed to be meeting Mifune."

"We will see what we can do," Naruto replied dryly. "What I want to know is what the bottle is for?"

"Bribe," Jiraiya said with a shameless grin. Jiraiya gave a short wave and ducked out before Naruto or either of the two women had the chance to say anything else.

"Well, at least he isn't wasting time. Onto more important things, you want to tell me what the guards did to make you all sour?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you have been wearing a scowl ever since we entered the city."

"Oh," Tenten said, pausing a moment before her scowl returned. Tenten drew one of her pistols and Naruto saw why. In addition to the wires keeping the trigger pulled back and locked closed there was a plug of wax that had been inserted into the barrel, covered with a thin pat of red wax that had been melted over the end, making it so that the plug could not be removed without being noticeable. "They also took all my ammo and all my gunpowder and ingredients."

"I don't really thing that you can fault them for taking your ammo and powder," Hinata said.

"That isn't what irks me, though. It's that they plugged up my guns with wax. The stuff is going to leave all kinds of crap in the barrel that is going to take forever to get out. And I am going to be hella mad if they lose anything."

"I am sure they won't, Tenten-chan," Naruto said evenly. "Why don't we take a look at the town like Jiraiya suggested?"

"Sounds good to me," Tenten said. Hinata just nodded when the other two looked at her.

"I was planning on meditating and some Dim Mak practice, but that can wait."

"Man, I will never figure out how you can stand to meditate for hours every other day."

"Patience, honey. That and the Dim Mak requires me to maintain balance in my chakra. But like you said, that can wait."

There were several soldiers lounging in the lounge area of the ground floor, but they were not the only members of Naruto's entourage present. "Good morning, Father," Naruto greeted neutrally. Hinata and Tenten said nothing, just looking at the priest with cool eyes. Neither Naruto nor Father Alexander offered the other a hand and neither missed the lack, especially given what had happened during Naruto's one and only Mass. "Is there something you wanted?" the blond ninja asked, ignoring how the hair on the back of my neck stood up and it became slightly harder to draw breath.

"Nothing terribly important," the priest said mildly. "I was just wondering, since you seem to be heading out if you would mind if I tagged along?"

"I suppose not," Naruto said after a moment. The Acolyte gave a small smile and opened the door, gesturing for them to go first. Naruto gave a nod in thanks and stepped into the sunlight. The two girls and the father followed him out, letting him lead then down the street. Other than the looming Mitsudara Castle behind the third wall, there was not much by the way of landmarks, or anything that would draw the attention, so Naruto started taking turns at random.

"So was there anything you wanted from us?" Hinata asked after about a half-dozen streets with an edge to her tone.

"Actually yes. Remember back when you came to Mass once on the way here? And your... episode afterwards?"

"I am pretty sure that none of us have forgotten that particular incident," Naruto responded dryly.

"Yes, well, I said that I would make some inquiries at the library in River about what happened during Mass. I got a reply."

That caught Naruto's interest. "Really? What's the news?"

"It is called the Presence of the Beast. It is a... condition, for lack of a better term, that all Jinchuuriki share, a result from being Jinchuuriki. As a Jinchuuriki, you have one foot in the Blind World, what most people call the material realm, and one foot firmly in the Seeing World, or the supernatural realm. There is not much more known, for obvious reasons, but what is known is that most of the supernatural phenomena surrounding Jinchuuriki and abilities that they possess not directly derived from their... counterparts can be attributed to the Presence."

"Other abilities? What do you mean?"

"Well, like I said, this is not an area that has been thoroughly documented, but the most pertinent example would be your second sight, the specific ability that is what allowed you to witness the Transubstantiation. There are also several anecdotes telling tales of Jinchuuriki or their predecessors possessing resistance to other supernatural abilities, and in a few rare instances outright immunity to powers such as the True Magic."

"Predecessors?" Hinata asked.

The Acolyte turned his gaze to Hinata, giving her a condescending smile. "This era is almost two thousand years old. The shinobi have been harnessing the power of the beings you call the Bijuu for less than a century. Surely you don't believe that you are the first or only human power to do so?"

Hinata did not answer, blushing lightly and averting her gaze. The Acolyte did not let his attention linger on her for long though, clearing his throat and continuing. "The Presence also seems to connect all Jinchuuriki together in some way, but the connection is not strong enough to manifest except when the Jinchuuriki are in close proximity to one another.

"In any case, I am having my contacts in the library continue to search for more information. Whether or not my contacts find anything else, you should consult the other Jinchuuriki about it."

"I suppose," Naruto allowed.

"This isn't anything that could harm him, could it?" Tenten asked.

"The Presence isn't a disease or an infection; it is a condition of being a Jinchuuriki. There is no cure except for removing the Black Soul that occupies his, and that is almost invariably lethal. It would require an exorcist of far more power and talent than I possess to cleanse his spirit. The only harm that the Presence could cause him would be from the unholy nature the Black Soul imbues him with."

"Naruto-kun is not evil," Tenten snapped instantly.

"I did not call him evil, merely unholy. It is not an insult, or a judgment of his personality or character, but a statement of fact. He holds one of the Nine Black Souls, what you call the Bijuu, in place of his own. It makes him unholy, and vulnerable to articles of faith. That is simply how it is."

Tenten frowned and crossed her arms over her chest but said nothing. "Nine Black Souls?" Hinata asked in place of anyone else.

The priest folded his arm over his chest, sighing and lowering his head. "It is not often I have to deal with shinobi, from Konoha or anywhere else, and sometimes I forget how insular you people can be. Alright, I am only going to explain this once, so listen closely. May I assume you have learned about the Third World War?"

Hinata scowled. "We are not entirely unlearned. Of course we do."

The Acolyte gave another condescending smile, this one directed at Hinata. "Yes, well let me refresh your memory, just in case you have forgotten a few of the details. The Third World War, called by some the Apocalypse War or the White War, was the two-hundred year conflict that ended what has alternately been called the Digital or Information Age. Almost nothing is known about whom or what started the war, except that the instigating principles were annihilated within the first decade. Nothing is known of the weapons that were used in the war, except that they were horrendously powerful, creating some of the deadliest land features of the world such as the Battlewaste of Taran at the heart of the Great Thirst of Sand, and the Gullet at the center of the World's Maw in Lightning, as well as the death valleys and the colorfully named thousand-year glows.

"At some point in the war, the laws of reality sort of... took a step to the side. What was once the real and unreal shifted, merged. As a result, the world is a far more... magical place than it had been prior to the war. Belief has power that it never did before, magic has authority over the Blind World that it never did before, creatures of myth, legend and nightmare exist now when they never could have before. The Black Souls are a perfect example of this. Nobody knows their true origins, not even the Black Souls themselves, and there are many theories as to their creation and existence, such as the sages' belief that they are the physical manifestation of our vices, which is about as scientific a theory as any out there.

"Another good example would be the Three Manas. The First Mana, or True Magic, is wielded by wizards and witches. They draw their power from the external world, channeling the power of the land to control wind, water, earth, fire, force, magnetism and a dozen other elements to do their bidding. True Magic is the most versatile of the three, based on the manipulation of energy, in whatever form it may take, the scope only limited by the wizard's imagination. They are typically longer-lived than the average human, and always wield a focus item of some sort to concentrate and direct their power, from a traditional staff to a chain or sword or a familiar of some sort.

"The Second Mana, or sorcery is used by, as you might imagine, sorcerers and sorceresses. They claim to draw their magic from what they call the Outside, what we call the Seeing World. Sorcerers' spells are called many different things, but most often referred to as Songs, Verses or Cants. As the name would imply, sorcerers sing their spells, claiming to speak with the voice of God to enact their will on reality. Their brand of magic is slightly more limited than the wizards, generally more violent, but they do have a few abilities that the First Mana doesn't have, such as a close imitation of flight. Sorcerers are most easily recognizable by the white light their eyes and mouths emit when casting spells.

"The Third Mana is called the Inner Wonder, and is arguably the most dangerous of the three. Magicians focus on illusion and the mental arts, and in my opinion, by far the most terrifying. They specialize in mental manipulation, much as your Uchiha and Yamanaka clans do, and are feared for the same reasons. You cannot trust any of your senses when in the presence of a magician, and sometimes even your memories can betray you. I have only met with one in my life, and I am eternally grateful that I have never encountered another. Magicians consider the Third Mana to be the most powerful magic, so they tend to act and dress the part. Magicians usually wear an enchanted half-mask to protect themselves against other magicians.

"There is a Fourth Mana, necromancy, but necromancers are invariably chaotic evil, and wizards, sorcerers and magicians will often actively hunt down any rumor of a necromancer in their area of influence, sometimes hiring or otherwise recruiting soldiers, mercenaries or shinobi to assist in the attack. Necromancers make a pact with the Grim Reaper itself, what you call the Shinigami, agreeing to trade a portion of their soul for a portion of the Reaper's power, and very rarely, an artifact of the Reaper's. They are the most dangerous type of magic user in terms of the lethality of their spells, wielding the power of Death itself against the living. My advice if you ever come up against a necromancer, run. They are extremely difficult to kill by virtue of allying with the Reaper, and generally can only be killed through overwhelming firepower."

"Is there anything else about the Kyuubi you want to tell us about?" Naruto said abruptly.

"No, I suppose that is everything for now."

"Good." A heartbeat passed and Naruto vanished in the blink of an eye.

"Well, I have to say that I am surprised it took him so long to depart."

"You were?" Tenten asked.

"I was. Frankly speaking, remaining in such close proximity to me for such an extended period of time must have been uncomfortable to say the very least. Between the strength of my faith, and the strength of the Black Soul in him, I would not be surprised if I gave him a mild sunburn or rash if we shook hands."

"Yet one more reason for you to stay away from Naruto-kun," Tenten told him.

The priest gave the two women a careful look. "You two don't like me very much, do you?"

"No shit," Hinata said flatly. "Is there any particular reason we should?" That caused Tenten to blink in surprise at Hinata, the other woman usually not being one to swear.

"Well, first of all, it was thanks to His Excellency the Archbishop that you were allowed to leave the country at all. Second, my presence in your companion's entourage-"

"Our husband," Hinata interjected.

"I'm sorry?"

"He is our husband, not our 'companion.'"

"I was unaware that Higurashi-san shared more with you than a friendship."

"We… aren't. Not yet."

"But they will be when we arrive in Kiri. It is just a matter of time."

"I… see. I can't say I approve, yet it is not my place to judge either. Going back to my original point, my presence in your husband's entourage provides you with more protection than you might imagine. I have already taught you more about what it means for your husband to be a Jinchuuriki than he has learned in his entire life.

"Third, not even your teacher, the illustrious Jiraiya, would have a better chance of controlling or restraining Naruto-san, or killing him in the worst case, should I have to. We Acolytes learn how to handle supernatural threats before we are ever let out of our compounds, my order trains for these threats specifically."

"And what is your order called? All we know of you is that you used to run the Acolyte compound outside of Urashima Military City."

"I am one of the forty Foreign Cardinals of the Church of the Jah's Black Order, also known as the Black Brotherhood."

"That means nothing to us." Tenten had yet to unfold her arms since Naruto left.

The Acolyte sighed. "I am on the ruling council of the organization that was formed from the remnants of, and is the sole legitimate successor to the Catholic Inquisition, reformed after the start of the White War, the Black Brotherhood. The head of our order can trace the lineage of his authority all the way back to High Holy Rome, to the man who was the last Grand Inquisitor of the Inquisition and leader of the Church after the destruction of High Holy Rome during the Third World War."

"So you believe you have the power to take Naruto on, if you have to."

"There are forty Foreign Cardinals, forty members of the Black Order, nominally equal in rank but in reality a meritocracy, but there are only three men stronger than me in the Order."

Hinata and Tenten exchanged a look before facing back to the Acolyte with stony faces. Father Alexander smiled. "And now you consider me a threat for the first time. Suddenly I have become someone you have to be on guard against at all times, someone you cannot trust in the least way."

Hinata and Tenten remained silent. The Acolyte chuckled. "And you are supposed to be kunoichi? I would have thought that you would know better than to take anything I said at face value, especially when I mention Naruto's episode on Sunday. I can say anything and claim that what happened at Mass supports my assertion. Really, have you never been taught to look underneath the underneath?" Another silent exchange. "I do not say this out of malice, but of experience."

"You sure do show your concern in a peculiar fashion," Hinata said after a moment.

Preceptor Hastings shrugged. "I teach as I was taught."

"If you will please excuse us, I think Tenten-chan and I will take our leave," Hinata said with measured tone. The priest smiled again, matching her shallow bow.

"But of course," his tone at odds with his suddenly rigid posture. Tenten turn away and matched Hinata for stride, heading away from the Cardinal.

OoOoO

"You two were out late." Jiraiya was hunched over the bar, a finger of some dark amber liquor loosely in one hand, peering over his shoulder.

"The Acolyte said something to offend Naruto, so we figured that Naruto would appreciate some time alone."

"Musta been something that really upset him. Strolled by with barely a glance my way." The two women traded another significant glance without answering.

"Damn, those three." Jiraiya cast his lidded gaze over the four foot tall liquor cabinet that stretched the whole back wall. "Maybe bring them a something to break the tension?" Jiraiya took another sip of his drink and considered the notion.

OoOoO

"You and Tenten have a nice day?"

"I suppose. Would have been better with you."

"I wouldn't have been good company."

"You can't take what the Acolyte said to heart. He knows nothing about you. Does his opinion or anything he says matter so much?" Hinata asked.

"He seemed rather well informed I thought. And what happened to me does fall in line with what happened Sunday."

"Do you have any proof to support anything that the priest said other than Sunday?"

OoOoO

Naruto looked back from where he had been leaning on a sill looking out the window. "I suppose not, but it seemed a little much to have made up on the spot."

"So it might be what they believe, but it doesn't mean that what they believe is true," Tenten argued.

"He never really claimed it was true, just what he believed. And he really does unsettle me. You have seen how I really try not to be within ten feet of him. I have never actually spoken to him about it, but he seems to try to avoid come closer to me than necessary as well. If he is telling the truth and even seems to know how I affect him, confirming what Jiraiya has said. And if he is telling the truth about one thing, he could be telling the truth about the rest."

OoOoO

"But by the same token just because one is true does not confirm the rest."

Naruto turned around and leaned back on the window sill. "Hinata, everything that he has said has pointed to him telling the truth." Naruto closed his eyes and tilted his head back. "He called me unholy, Hinata. It... isn't pleasant."

"I understand, Naruto-kun, but again, just because he said it doesn't mean it is true."

"I know that. But it is not so easy to brush that kind of thing off all the time."

"Well, just know both Tenten and I are here.

"I have one more question for you though. Do you respect me?"

"What? Of course I do, Naruto. Why would you ask me that?"

"Sometimes it doesn't seem like it. I know that you two are just being funny when you talk about me messing up, but it isn't. Not to me. I am a pretty good fighter, I think on my feet pretty well, and lot of the stuff back in the Academy was fake but the book learning wasn't. I was never a good student. Most of the reason why I cut class back in the Academy all the time was I had a hard time understanding what the teachers were doing. So that made things boring, and I could easily think of mush more fun things to do than listen to a grown-up talk about things I didn't get all day."

"I'm... sorry Naruto-kun. I did not know that you took what I said so seriously."

"I do, and at the same time I don't. I know you don't actually mean it when you say stuff like that, but sometimes some of what you say strikes closer to home then I really want to think about. I care about what you and Tenten think about me, a lot, and it... I really don't want you to think that I really am that dumb."

"Well, for what it is worth, I won't say anything like that again. And I hope I don't really have to say this, but Tenten and I really do respect you. You are the strongest ninja of our generation, and you will be Hokage someday. You do the most amazing things, take on enemies that most other people would have serious thought about fighting without a second thought, and you _win._ You never doubt yourself; you see a problem, think of a solution and go after that solution with everything you have. This trip is proof of all that, if either of us needed it. Never doubt us, Naruto, our love, our faith or our respect. You have it all."

Naruto smiled and wrapped his arms around Hinata as she hugged him. "Thanks," he said quietly, pressing a kiss into her hair.

"None necessary. I haven't said anything that isn't absolutely true."

"Still, it does feel good to have you say those things. And contrary to what it may seem, I am not always as confident as I might appear. This thing I am trying to do, unite the Jinchuuriki..." He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, hugging Hinata tighter. "Sometimes, I have these... I don't know what to call them, but it's like I take a step out of my own body, and I can hardly believe what it is I am doing. Who the hell am I to go all these different countries, some of which have been enemies of Fire for as long as anyone can remember, and expect them to work together? I am all but daring Akatsuki to come at me, because they will when they find out about what I am doing. _Itachi fucking Clan-killer_ knows my name, knows my face. It terrifies me, the thought of him coming after me, almost as much as the Kyuubi does. Who the hell am I to stand up to a man like him?"

"You are Uzumaki Naruto, that's who. Jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi no Kitsune, shinigami, savior of Konoha and most importantly, the love of my life and my husband. You do the impossible at the drop of a hat, defeat enemies that anyone else in your shoes would simply try to survive and then make them your friends. You do the most amazing things and think nothing of it. You..." Hinata trailed off, searching for the proper words to describe what she felt. "You and I have been married for almost a year now, but sometimes I find myself breathless with disbelief, that I, Hyuuga Hinata, am your wife. I look at you and wonder what I could have ever done to deserve such a wonderful, amazing, awesome, incredible person like you in my life. You say that you have doubts that you can unite the Jinchuuriki? That you wonder if you are strong enough to defeat Akatsuki? I don't. I have faith in you, and if there ever comes a time where your faith in yourself fails, then believe in my faith in you, because I know that you will never fail without having done everything in your power to succeed."

"I think I can do that, though I wonder if you might be putting too much faith in my abilities."

"I don't. And does Tenten."

"You have talked to Tenten about this?"

"You are our husband. Tenten and I discuss all kinds of things about you."

"Should that worry me?"

Hinata took a step away, turning and crossing her arms under her breasts. "Come on Naruto. How are we supposed to manage you if we don't talk about you?"

"Manage me?"

"We have been over this before. You can't take Akatsuki on alone; you need Tenten and me to beat them. You are going to make mistakes and that means that we are going to have to clean up after you."

"Hey, I can clean up my own messes; I don't need anyone mopping up after me."

"When you are Hokage, you can't take care of everything yourself, you will have to delegate. And that means that you will have to let other people do things you may want to do, or think you have to do. Tenten and I will have to manage those impulses, manage you."

"You know, that sounds a teeny bit sexy, when you say it like that. Managing my impulses."

"Careful there, Honey. You are starting to sound like Ero-sennin."

"Hold on, did you just call Jiraiya Ero-sennin? Not Jiraiya-sama or Jiraiya-sensei, but Ero-sennin?"

"Well, it only seemed appropriate, especially after he gave you this." Hinata sashayed over to where her bags were against the opposite wall and withdrew a certain book. She turned back to him with a dangerous smile, tapping her forefinger against the cover.

"Whoa, I... uh, it really wasn't my idea, uh, having to read it."

"Oh? So you did read it? Cover-to-cover?"

"Uh, not necessarily cover-to-cover. Just the-"

"Just the interesting parts?" Hinata asked, smile firmly in place, slinking back to Naruto, book still in hand.

"Maybe?"

"Well, that is... disappointing. Because there are some very... interesting... parts that you missed then."

"Uh, that certainly sounds...uh…fascinating."

"I am glad you agree," Hinata murmured, wrapping her arms around Naruto's neck and pressing her lips to his. The heat of her kiss caught him a little off guard, but he quickly gave a mental shrug and wrapped his hands around the small of her back. Hinata dropped one of her hands from where it was to take one of his hands and place it firmly on her rear.

"Whoa, Hinata," Naruto said, pulling back a little.

"No, Naruto," she muttered, planting several kisses on his neck.

"Hinata, come on, slow down."

"No, Naruto, I want you now."

"Hinata, just-"

"Oh God _dammit_ Naruto," Hinata suddenly swore, giving him a not-to-gentle shove, stepping and turning away for a moment. "Just what, Naruto?" she growled, turning to face him again. "Just the fuck what?"

"Hey, hey, calm down there, love. I wasn't trying to uh..."

"Trying to upset me? Well good job with that!"

"Yeah, that is one way to put it, I guess," he said cautiously.

"What is it about me that you find so unattractive, Naruto? What is it about me that makes you not want to do more than kiss me? Do you really not want to sleep with me at all?" she demanded.

"Wait, what? What the hell makes you think that I don't find you attractive?"

"Well, every time I try to... initiate... you always push me away. I am your _wife,_ Naruto; does that not mean anything to you?"

"Sure it does, it means everything to me."

"Are you sure? Because it really does not feel like it. Not really. You don't even share my bed, and the most I can ever get you of you is a little make-out time, every once in a while." Hinata whirled away again, pressing a hand to her face and letting out a frustrated grunt. "I don't know about you, but I... I have needs. I want you so bad it hurts sometimes, and I get so goddamn _horny_ sometimes, thinking of what you must do with Tenten when you two are alone, and _know_ this isn't fair, but I... I get jealous. I mean, you lived with her in her apartment before we left Konoha, and... dammit, I don't know how else to say it but I want that. Me and you, together at night. I want you to take me and throw me on the bed and tear off my shirt and squeeze my breast and stick your tongue down my throat and... and..."

Naruto remained back against the wall where Hinata had pushed him, quite flummoxed by her little speech. "I... uh... I am not really sure what to say," he said carefully.

Hinata was blushing heavily, but her gaze never wavered from Naruto's face. "I want you to say that you want me as badly as I want you. I want you to say that I turn you on, that I arouse you, that I make you hard. I want to feel like I am your wife in more than just name. I..." Hinata trailed off, her words finally failing her.

"I really don't know what to say, Hinata. I have never wanted to make you doubt that I don't love you or don't want you, but I was always afraid of pushing you to hard and... I dunno, scaring you off, I guess. I have never really had much in the way of girlfriend experience, and the thought of doing something that you would consider too forward or aggressive or crude or anything that might make you think I was too... common for you. You are the first daughter of Hyuuga Hiashi, the head of what is the closest thing to a royal family we have now. I mean, you are a lady. Me? Not so much."

"I know I have told you this before, but apparently I have to tell you again. I love you, Naruto. I love you with everything I have. You are the strongest, fastest, best fighter of our generation. My father chose you, Uzumaki Naruto, to be my husband, and that is not something I would change for anything in the world. You are the son of the Fourth Hokage, and that means that you could never be too common or low for me. You are my husband, Naruto. I don't know how to put it any other way than that. There is nothing you could do that would make me think you are anything but utterly worthy of me. So if you could please take this stupid inferiority complex of yours and stuff it, because I really don't want to have to go through this with you again. Now come and take my shirt off and let's go to bed."

OoOoO

Hinata emerged from her room the next morning wearing a carefully set mask, a slight rosy tinge to her cheeks that was all that betrayed her emotions to Tenten and Jiraiya, the former wearing a very knowing smile.

It was a group of six that approached the castle wall of Mitsudara Castle, the four ninja, the priest and Sergeant Kurosaki.

The four ninja were in the Legion uniforms that Jiraiya had provided them almost a month ago, lacking any sort of formal attire as shinobi did not have anything that could be likened to a uniform other than the flak jackets that chunin and jounin wore. Father Alexander wore the same black and white cassock and collar, with the singular addition of a simple gold cross on a silver chain.

As Naruto had surmised the day before upon entering Mitsudara Town, the castle was not very physically impressive. Built inside the third of the town's three walls, identical to the first two in everything but height, only a third of the first two, the castle was only seven or eight stories tall. The castle sat on a foundation of rounded red stones and white mortar that raised the first floor just a few feet above the narrow moat. The castle itself didn't seem to cover much more than a hundred square yards or so, Naruto guesstimating the size from the width of the front wall and the lack of any annexes or wings that would break the apparent squareness of the wall, foundation and keep.

It took less than a minute to pass the palace gate guard's inspection, a test of the integrity of everyone's peace-ties and a quick examination of everyone's passport entry stamps and photos being all that was required. A dozen guards formed a box around the six of them with a thirteenth leading the procession across the already lowered bridge and into the castle proper. The castle guards were attired in full dress regalia, predictably iron grey coats of a noticeably finer cut and weave than the gate and town guards wore under burnished steel breastplates and simple three-piece zunari kabuto. The flat grey of the Iron character crest mounted above their foreheads stood out in sharp contrast to the polished steel of the rest of their armor.

Each of the guards wore two swords on their hips, unlike the gate and town guards who only bore one, but also carried a somewhat trident-shaped spear, two steel blades about half as long as the center forming the two curved outer prongs. Each of the palace guards wore a steel badge on their shoulders like the gate guards had, in the shape of the Three Wolves instead of a gate. The twelve guards that ringed Naruto wore a small spear pin under palace guard badge, what Naruto assumed to denote their rank as the guard that led the way had a single sword instead.

The group proceeded in complete near silence; the thump of the guard's boots and spears sounding in odd counterpoint of the oddly musical creaking of the wooden floor itself. After an interminable amount of time that was probably no more than twenty minutes and enough turns to do the labyrinthine Final Redoubt proud they arrived at a set of plain brown double doors, beyond which was a room that Sarutobi or Tsunade would have been at home in. All but two of the guards remained outside, the pair that accompanied them in opening the doors before the group and closing them after. The room was not as spacious as Naruto had expected, floor-to-ceiling book- and scrollshelves set into the walls, a large low-slung desk by the rear wall, a man of an age with Sarutobi seated with folded legs on a thick cushion. Wrinkled with age and sporting a long grey mustache and goatee, his black eyes glittered like onyx.

Stopping approximately halfway between the doors behind him and Mifune, Naruto and the others several steps behind, Jiraiya offered a brief bow to Mifune and spoke.

"My Lord Mifune, before we begin, please allow me to thank you for granting us an audience on such short notice."

"It is not often you grace my castle with your presence, Jiraiya-dono. And when you do you usually have good, urgent reason to do so. So if you do not mind dispensing with pleasantries, what may Iron do to assist you? Or is that a question that I should be directing to your apprentice?"

Jiraiya said nothing, giving Mifune another shallow bow and stepped back to the others. Mifune shifted to a more comfortable cross-legged position and set his elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers in front of his face. "So just what is it you require of my country, Captain Hyuuga Naruto, chunin of Konohagakure no Sato and Jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi no Kitsune?"

The Governor-General's address only gave him a second's pause before replying. "To be perfectly blunt my lord, it is your neutrality that I have come for today."

"That is a bold request," Mifune stated, both tone and expression mild. "And vague. Who is it you wish me to direct my strength against?"

"No country or person that would necessitate you breaking any treaty or agreement you now hold. I have been told that Iron has one of the most extensive spy networks in the world, so I do not say what I am about to it imply any ignorance on your part, but rather to provide context for my petition this day.

"As I am sure you are aware, there is a criminal organization of nine missing-nin calling itself Akatsuki with the stated goal of abducting the nine Jinchuuriki. Through his own spy network, my master has been able to positively identify each of the seven public Akatsuki members as an internationally wanted S-ranked criminal, with the clandestine leader and what we assume to be his lieutenant presumed to be equally as dangerous. And while we have not been able to learn what Akatsuki wants with all nine Jinchuuriki, the exact details of their endgame could be reasonably considered more or less irrelevant at this point in time, as whatever Akatsuki plans to do once they have all of the Jinchuuriki, war is the only possible outcome. Akatsuki may not instigate the war, but there is no way that any of the Five Elemental Nations would allow any attempt on their Jinchuuriki to pass without an armed response.

"That now brings me to the reason why I have come to you today, my lord. In order to combat the threat that Akatsuki poses to the world, I want to go to the other Jinchuuriki-holding nations and try to bring my fellow Jinchuuriki together and form an organization to counter Akatsuki. But to do that, I need a neutral location to host my group, some place where no one Jinchuuriki-holding country can claim advantage over another. And I think that your country is that place."

If Mifune had been seated in a chair, Naruto imagined that he would be leaning back in it right now, but his surprise was made plenty clear from the way that his eyebrows tried to climb into his hair and the roundness of his eyes. "That is quite the undertaking you have given yourself, Captain Hyuuga, and have come a fair distance already in your quest." Mifune spoke slowly, his tone one of careful interest, his gaze and attention focusing completely on Naruto, scrutinizing him in a new light.

"And I intend to go a great deal farther.," the blond replied firmly, squaring his shoulders and meeting Mifune's gaze head-on. "Your support would ease my burdens and increase my chance of success by more than anything else I have done yet."

"I am sure it would," Mifune agreed with a careful nod. "What I have yet to hear is how assisting you benefits me or my country."

"Before I came to meet you this morning, I was told that I was to give you nothing but the rawest most honest truth so that is exactly what I am going to do. I will freely admit that there will not be any immediately tangible benefit or profit to any arrangement we might come to today. But there will be long-term consequences if I fail. Konoha was barely able to defeat the Kyuubi when it attacked fourteen years ago, and could have quite possibly caused the destruction of Konoha directly or otherwise were it not for the intervention and sacrifice of my father. Knowing that, can you say that you have the strength to stand alone against two of the Nine? Five of the Nine? All of the Nine? Because that is what it's going to come down to, sooner or later, without my group."

"You sound very certain of yourself, Captain Hyuuga. How can you be so sure of what will happen if you fail in your mission?"

"Forgive me for the rudeness of what I am about to say, but you would have to be a fool to believe otherwise."

Mifune folded his hands in his lap and carefully wiped his face of all expression. "That was indeed very rude. I certainly hope that you have good follow-up to that comment."

"And I apologize again, but I can't see any possible future if I fail." Naruto shook his head in disbelief. "I am hardly an expert in international relations, but even I can see the absurdity of calling the international community a community." Naruto paused for a moment, waiting to see if Mifune would reply to that, but he didn't. "The treaty that was signed at the end of the Third Ninja War is hardly more than a non-aggression pact, and it certainly doesn't provide anything for mutual defense or application of unified international sanctions, let alone any sort of international authority. And while I will acknowledge that some of the smaller countries have formed several two- or three-nation alliances, none of the Jinchuuriki nations are part of these alliances, so therefore irrelevant to Akatsuki." Naruto paused again, taking a moment to organize his arguments.

"And I can't imagine you believing that anybody is going to come to the aid of a nation who lost their Jinchuuriki until it is too late. Iron is hardly the most beloved nation in the world, so I would be rather surprised if anybody was willing to accept your help, were you to offer it. And the more Jinchuuriki Akatsuki acquires, the harder they will be to stop, until they cannot be stopped."

Mifune was silent for almost thirty seconds, steepling his hands under his nose again as he weighed Naruto's words. "You paint a dire picture in the event of your failure, nearly cataclysmic in its consequences. And, almost against my better judgment, I find that I think I believe you. I think you have come too far for your quest to be false. And I can't say that I am entirely opposed to the idea itself. It should certainly add some much needed stability to the balance of shinobi nations should you succeed. May I assume that Jiraiya has taken one of you three as his apprentice?"

"I am," Naruto said.

"Then here is what you will do," he informed Naruto, folding his hands on the table and sitting up straight, almost glaring at Naruto as he spoke. "You will send a toad every two weeks to inform me of your progress, whatever it should be. You will not involve me or my nation in any... disagreements that might arise during the course of your travels. I am only giving you the most provisional endorsement for your plan and agree host any group you might form, but do not take that to mean that I will offer you any tangible assistance until you have organized your group. You miss a message or involve me in any matter that I do not wish to be directly involved in, you will say goodbye to any and all support you would receive from me and no longer be welcome within my borders. Am I clear?"

"You are, my lord, though I have to say that I am a little surprised you are not sending a minder with me though seeing how just about everyone else seems to want to."

"I care not for your wellbeing, shinobi. I have no investment in your success or failure. Frankly speaking, I really do not care what you do or what happens to you, as long as I and my nation are not adversely affected. And there is not much that I could do to further ensure your safety, what with your Fire escort and the Acolyte."

"You haven't asked anything about where I am going next either."

"Why should I? I care not for anything you do once you leave my land. You will inform me of whatever you have accomplished with your first message in any case."

"I guess you have a point," Naruto admitted.

"I do have a point," Mifune repeated. "Now, is there anything you require of me?"

Naruto gave a quick look over his shoulder at Jiraiya, who shook his head, doing the same at Mifune. "The palace guards will show you out."

"If I may, my lord Governor-General, what about the Salin district? Super Company hasn't been heard from in four days now. It might be a good way to see just how dedicated this Captain Hyuuga is to his plan, sending him out there.

Mifune fixed Naruto with a brief, contemplative look before answering. "That might be a good, idea, Lin. I had been intending to send the Third Battalion from the Home Legion to Salin to reinforce and investigate after Super Company if there was no word by the day after tomorrow. Perhaps Jiraiya-dono or the Acolyte might be able to use their esoteric knowledge to better identify whatever it is that is causing problems in Salin."

"I'm sorry, but what are you talking about?" Naruto asked Mifune.

"The regional garrison of one of my outlying districts started sending reports of unrest in the region about a week ago. I sent an investigative unit, an oversized company specializing in fact-finding and investigation to try to ascertain just was going on in Salin, the sporadic and somewhat confused intelligence we had been receiving having halted three days ago when Super Company after only a single report when it was supposed to report in every single day. At this point I must assume that any strategically significant Iron forces have been wiped out or otherwise rendered ineffective. I was going to send a larger and more elite unit on Friday, but you and your team might be better equipped to investigate what is going on, Captain."

"What is the civilian population?" he asked.

"Salin is about the fifth most populated district in Iron, out of eight total, being one of the more temperate districts in Iron." Mifune said. "Not much by the way of strategic targets or resources other than its status as one of Iron's best vacationing areas, but the last census taken about four years ago put Salin's populations at a little over half a million civilian residents and about another two hundred thousand military retirees."

"I had intended to travel to Sand next, but I might be willing to at least see what is going on as long as it is not too far in the opposite direction," Naruto offered.

"Salin would only be about a hundred fifty miles out of your way from Sand's capital and Hidden Village, only a day or two out of your way I would think."

"I already told you I don't really care where we go," Jiraiya said at Naruto's silent question. "This is your expedition, not mine."

"I think we should go," Hinata said. "There is no telling what has happened in Salin, but the lack of any communication from what Jiraiya-sensei has all but outsight stated to be among the most capable soldiers in the world may mean that the situation requires someone… special to find a solution. You are the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki; not many people more 'special' than you. And we have Father Alexander and Jiraiya-sensei to help. There can't be many groups better equipped to handle whatever is going on in Salin. At the very least, I think that we should at least pass through to try to find Mifune-sama's missing company."

"You said it yourself; it is not like we are on a deadline to reach Sand." Tenten gave a little shrug. "I can't say that I would be able to rest easy knowing that we did not conduct a cursory investigation at a minimum, especially given how it is so close."

"Well, my wives say I should, so I guess we will take a look around on the way through at the very least."

Mifune cocked his head and gave a small pleased smile. "I am glad you have chosen to render me your assistance. To tell the truth, the fact that the entire district has gone silent is rather worrisome, especially as I do not claim any territory that that is distant enough for a messenger hawk to take more than half or two-thirds of a day to travel from. Not to say that a hawk couldn't be intercepted, but Super Company would be carrying about a dozen. We should have received more than one by now, whoever Super Company's commander is keep sending hawks until he got a reply.

"Now, if you could excuse me, I am occupied with some more immediate matters of rule at the moment. My Captain Lin can take and provide you with the most recent intelligence we have on the area before you depart."

"Absolutely," Jiraiya said and nodded from where he stood with the rest of the group. "We thank you for your time, my lord." The elderly general performed a sharp about-face and strode through the quickly opened doors, pausing just outside to allow the others to catch up and the guards to surround them.

Coming from the front doors of the castle the approach to Mifune's office had been from a long hallway at least a hundred yards long that led nowhere else. Emerging from the room, the man Mifune had called captain made an immediate turn down a hallway perpendicular to the main approach that Naruto could not recall having seen before. It took less than a minute for the man Mifune had addressed as Captain Lin to lead Naruto and the others to what Naruto assumed to be his office, given his apparent rank in the palace guard and how he went to a scrollshelf built into the wall behind the modest desk, taking several moments to locate a three scrolls in a square cubbyhole at the top of the shelf near the end of his reach. The scrolls were not large, creased to be fit in a messenger hawk's leather pouch.

"Those are all three reports we have received from the Salin region over the last week. The first is the initial report from the district capital's Legion garrison. It is not very specific, just saying that there had been several 'weird' incidences reported to the capital from several of the small to medium towns in the district. The second scroll is nearly as vague, saying that three towns had been completely and violently depopulated, any of the three having been fortified enough that they should have been able to last long enough to send word of any assault. Before you ask, whatever force that sacked the towns could not have been more than mid-battalion strength to cross our borders detected. We cannot estimate the precise size or even where they could have possibly come from as no bodies, theirs or ours, weapons, armor or anything that might give the slightest indication of who or what is going on have been recovered.

The second scroll is the only communication the platoon the Salin garrison sent out got off before going dark. According to the lieutenant leading the platoon, none of the towns that have been attacked suffered any damage unique enough to identify the enemy force, our best assumption from the burned buildings discovered that the enemy burns any structure that becomes damaged in the attack. Whatever defensive fortifications the towns possess remain mostly intact, except where they have been breached, dirt, wood and stone subjected to a hot enough flame to incinerate or melt anything the town walls are made from.

"The third scroll is the only one from Super Company after they arrived in Salin. The only thing of note from it is the description of the foul miasma that hung over the only town that they investigated before going silent. The smell alternately described as, and I quote, 'a barn packed full of wild animals that had never had the occasion to be graced by water's touch and their shit or every living thing rotted alive and tossed in the same barn. It wasn't strong enough to impede their investigation, but they were unable to remain overnight."

Naruto read the three reports first as the captain spoke, passing them to Jiraiya, then to Father Alexander and the two girls before Sergeant Kurosaki handed them back to the Iron captain. "And that is everything that we know. I have to say, the company that the Governor-General sent to investigate is one of our most decorated elite units. They should have been able to handle a force up to half again as large as they were. The fact that they have gone completely silent means that the enemy is either very, very good, or large enough that they should not have been able to remain undetected within our borders, both possibilities that are of great concern to the Governor-General. Neither my lord nor I expect or request you to handle whoever or whatever it is that has silenced a significant area of Salin. Get in there, try to figure out what is going on, but stay safe above all. We need information, not more bodies. Iron does not wish to be accused of instigating a diplomatic incident, which is what would happen should you disappear inside our borders conducting an investigation on our behalf. If you cannot find anything to investigate within a reasonable period of time, simply send me a report documenting of anything and everything that could possibly assist whomever takes over the case."

"We will do anything we can to find out what is going on, Captain."

"The Salin reports must stay with me here, but do you wish to have copies?"

"Can't hurt, I suppose," Naruto said. "Impossible to tell just what information could be important at this point."

"My thoughts as well, more or less. If you will wait here for just a moment, I will return with your copies." Two of the guards standing post outside slipped in to make sure none of Naruto's group touched anything as Captain Lin left. He reentered about two minutes later the copies of the reports in a leather envelop with the Iron-kanji-and-circle stamped into the leather. "There is also a map with the towns that have been sacked marked."

Once again, the guards from a box around everyone and followed Lin to the main entrance.

"That was far easier than I was anticipating," Naruto said once they were back in the castle town.

"I don't know why you were expecting it to be different. Mifune was never very likely to turn you down, especially given just how little he has to do. He loses nothing if you fail, and stands to gain quite a bit if you succeed."

"Eh, I suppose," Naruto allowed. "And he got us to go and investigate whatever it is that is going on down in Salin. And for free. What do you think Tsunade would charge for something like this?"

"Well, given the number and caliber of soldiers that have gone missing, I would say it would be an expensive A-rank, a jounin platoon likely formed for it."

"So he is getting a deal out of this."

"One way of putting it. Although it is hardly like he is not without resources of his own to use to resolve his own problems. That is not to say that he does not have a point; if there is something weird going on, we are better equipped than most to deal with it."

"We are at that," the Acolyte agreed.

"Captain Hyuuga, you shinobi are one of our most potent force multipliers, but I hope that we are not biting off more than we can chew. Super Company, the unit that the Governor-General sent to Salin, is not a regular company. They are known to serve mostly as a troubleshooter unit for the Governor-General. They get sent in whenever a situation arises that other less… specialized… units would fail. Collectively, we stand at less than platoon strength, when whatever is down in Salin has very likely destroyed Super Company, a full three hundred men of the best trained soldiers in Iron." Kurosaki shrugged. "My men and I will follow you and your orders, wherever they may lead or whatever they are, sir, as we were ordered to, but I just wish to apprise you of just what we will be walking into."

"I appreciate your input, Sergeant, but we will still be heading to Salin."

"Yes, sir. I will inform my men and make sure that we are as prepared as we can be."

"See that you do." The grey stone shape of the Wayfarer's Rest had come into sight by now, so Kurosaki tossed off a quick salute and headed around the side of the building to where the soldiers and horses were.

"Alright, well we have gotten everything that we need from here. It is still early, so I would like to get some distance on Salin before we have to make camp tonight."

Jiraiya, Hinata, Tenten and the priest all nodded, splitting up into their rooms to pack.

**A/N: Hey, Naruto found a sidequest! Wonder what kind of loot he will find~**

**Lotta things happening here, making this the second longest Shinigami no Naruto chapter, and the longest Jinchuuriki Tails chapter. Next couple of chapters are going to be pretty fun though, at least for me, so that may or may not mean quicker chapters, life permitting. **


	8. The Salin Investigation Part One

**Chapter 8: The Salin Investigation, Part One**

As Mifune had said, it only took a day and a half to reach Salin. The wintry weather that had gripped the area around Mitsudara Castle had broken early the second day, returning to the chilly, but bearable temperatures that the group had been experiencing before crossing into Iron. The land had gotten much flatter as well, still somewhat hilly, but a far cry from the shattered terrain surrounding Mitsudara Castle.

It was maybe an hour after noon when Naruto and company came upon the town of Jinna, the last known location of the missing Super Company. Naruto, Jiraiya, Father Alexander and Sergeant Kurosaki all stood on a slight rise overlooking the town of Jinna, maybe a mile distant. Each of them looked through a pair of large binoculars, surveying the silent town. As Captain Lin had said, other than the gate in the palisade wall that had been smashed through and the half a dozen or so buildings that had been reduced to little more than heaps of ashes, there was nothing to indicate any kind of violent conflict in the town.

"Well, there isn't much more than we can do up here." Jiraiya tossed his binoculars to the sergeant and headed down the hill. "So, there is nothing visibly wrong with the town, at least not at this distance, that means that we are going to have a first-hand look-see. Now, I hope this goes without saying, but eyes open and weapons ready at all times. We have no idea what it was that happened here, so be ready for anything."

The dozen Legion soldier each freed their rifles from where they were holstered on their horses, the three shinigami shinobi and Father Alexander each drawing bright steel. The group approached the town at a slow jog, taking a couple of minutes to reach the gate. Everyone slowed down to a careful walk as they passed through the ruined gate and proceeded down the main avenue, the Legion soldiers spreading out to cover every direction, including a few straight up, with a dozen Naruto clones mixed in. It was silent, literally dead silent, not a squirrel, mouse or rabbit to be seen. There was no particular odor to the place, the stench that Super Company reported long since faded away. As had been previously observed, the town was mostly intact, almost no sign of an attack, other than the burned building and some kicked-in doors. There were no bodies, no blood, no discarded weapons of any sort.

"Okay, so nothing more alive than a doornail," Jiraiya said as they reached the town square. "Time to spread out people. Pair up and take three Narutos." The soldiers did as Jiraiya said, and Naruto threw his hands together, two dozen more copies poofing into existence.

The original Naruto, Hinata and Tenten grouped up of course, Jiraiya and Father Alexander each going with a different fire team. The search took several hours to complete, soldiers and shinobi regrouping back in the center of the town about two hours before sunset. The Fire sergeant took several minutes to collect his men's reports before approaching Naruto and his group.

"The town is completely deserted," Sergeant Kurosaki reported, shaking his head. "Some of the buildings had their doors have been kicked in and most look to have been ransacked to varying degrees. Wardrobes, closets, dressers, cabinets, pretty much anything that could be used to hold or store things were torn down or knocked over, contents tossed everywhere. There was evidence of some chairs and tables and the like being destroyed, but that's it." Kurosaki shrugged. "No food at all either. Pantries completely emptied. Otherwise just looks like everyone got up in the middle of the day and left." He gave a simple shrug, clearly unsure what to make of his report.

"Everything is exactly like that Lin guy said it would be. There is nothing here," Tenten agreed.

"Did there seem to be anything that was obviously missing in the buildings that were searched?"

"Is there something specific you are thinking of?"

"No, just anything that looked wrong, lighter spots on walls, carpet that had been crushed."

Kurosaki closed his eyes reviewed his men's reports, but shook his head after a few seconds. "Nothing like that. There were some emptied safes that had been found, but my men would have noticed if there had been anything obviously out of place or missing."

"Are you absolutely certain of that?" Jiraiya asked.

"I am. Our regiment is the police force for both the Home Legion and the capital itself as well as responsible for the security of visiting VIPs. So we have to be the best at what we do, which we are."

"So what now?" Naruto asked Jiraiya.

"I am not entirely sure. I had not actually believed that the town would be so… clean. I was sure that there would be something that Mifune's men had missed, something that would give us a clue as to what happened here."

"So that's it?" Hinata asked. "We're done here?"

"Not yet, not by a long shot. The complete lack of anything that could shed some light on whatever happened here is proof itself of some malicious intent behind these events." Jiraiya paused for a moment, thinking. "Sergeant, did you or any of your men search whatever is left of the burned buildings?"

"We did. I did not find anything of use in the two ruins I found, but I would like to have one of my men tell you the rest." Kurosaki turned and waved for one of the soldiers to come over.

"This is Private First Class Kirishima Date," Kurosaki said as the man came to attention and snapped a salute at Naruto. "Private Kirishima is my fire officer, having considerable experience conducting fire origin-and-cause investigations. Please repeat to the Captain what you told me about the two ruins you inspected with me."

"There were several anomalies with the two ruins I inspected. First was the near complete lack of any debris left by the fire. Any fire hot enough to leave little more than a few twisted steel beams and ash should have had some kind of accelerant to aid the ignition, which I could not find. But between the age of the ruins and exposure to the elements, that is hardly unexpected. Second, given the intensity of the fire required to do the kind of damage done, there should have been significant damage to the surrounding buildings, yet they are practically untouched."

"So what are you saying?"

"The fires that burned these buildings were not normal. I can't say what caused them, but it these fires are like nothing I have ever seen."

"So yet another mystery to add to the pile." Jiraiya sighed. "There has to be something here we are missing here."

"I agree, Jiraiya-san, and I think I may have a good way to do that. I think it would be a good time for our young captain to learn to use his second sight."

"Might as well," Jiraiya said with a verbal shrug, "given the total lack of anything we have found yet."

"How long will this take?" Naruto asked.

"Opening your Third Eye is easy. It is being able to close it that is going to be the difficult part. Come, this is something that would best be done elsewhere." Nobody disagreed and everyone exited the town posthaste. Naruto, Father Alexander, Jiraiya and the two women returned to the top of the hill overlooking the town, while Sergeant Kurosaki and his men set up a small camp at the foot, on the near side to the town. Naruto and the Cardinal seated themselves on the grass, knees almost touching, while the other three stood and watched. Father Alexander spoke slowly and with almost comically precise enunciation, clearly taking the time to find the right words to convey his thoughts. He did not quite glare at Naruto, but he stared at Naruto with unblinking intensity, as if he were trying to drill the meaning of his words directly into Naruto's brain with his eyes.

"Before we start, let me say that while I obviously do not possess or can lay any claim to the second sight, every brother of the Black Order is trained as a seer before he is allowed to become an Acolyte, whether or not he actually possesses the Eye. Before I teach you anything though, I must warn you; the second sight is not something to use lightly or frequently, only when every other option has failed. Your second sight will allow you to see the true nature of things, past the Blinding Shroud and into the Seeing World. I have taught you a little of the Blind and Seeing Worlds already, but there is more you must know in before I will teach you to open your Third Eye.

"The very nature of the relationship binding the two worlds makes precise description difficult, but the first thing that you must know is that the Blind World and the Seeing World are not two separate planes or dimensions. Rather, they are more like two faces of a single coin or two different colored threads in a weaving, two entire planes of existence vibrating at precisely antipodal frequencies, occupying the same space and at the same time infinitely distant.

"Now, the most basic ability the second sight grants you, upon which every other ability is based, is to see past the Blinding Shroud. Despite what its name would imply, the Shroud is not a concrete… delineation between the two worlds, but the distance between the frequency each world vibrates at, to continue the metaphor.

"Because the Seeing World is a reflection of the Blind World, constructed entirely of the collective thoughts, dreams, nightmares and beliefs of the human race, people or events that make a large enough…impression or impact on the Blind World are also reflected in the Seeing World. If you open your Third Eye wide enough, you may be able to see those reflections.

"You must be careful of what you set your sight on though. It will mark anything you see with it in your memory brightly and forever, regardless of its beauty or ugliness. You see things that humans are not meant to see, and you see too many of those things, you will go insane. Seers are well known for dying young from seeing too many things not meant to. Now having warned you, close your eyes and center yourself. Focus on a point halfway between the center of your brain and your forehead. There should be a prick of light, a subtle point of pressure there. Can you find it?"

There was a long pause before Naruto responded. "No, I don't sense anything like that."

"Not surprising," Father Alexander said evenly. "I would have been if you had found your Eye right off the bat. Just keep trying. That is all you can do at the moment." Naruto said nothing, just continuing to meditate.

"I have a question, Father Alexander. May I assume that you have heard of the Uchiha clan's kekkei genkai, the Sharingan?"

"Of course I have, Hyuuga-san. There are few factions as insular as you shinobi are and one of the primary mandates of my Order is to serve as one of the Church's Orders Militant and the Chamber Supernal. That means that I have a cursory knowledge of most of the more… extraordinary abilities around."

"Well, it appears to me that this Third Eye you say Naruto has is pretty similar to the Sharingan in a lot of ways."

"And there is a reason for that. Most of the ocular bloodlines, both shinobi and otherwise, come from the second sight in some way. The Uchiha were probably a clan of seers a long time ago, before they became a clan of shinobi, and at some point as they started to become more militant began to focus the training and development of their second sight in directions that would be more suited to a clan of assassins. The Sharingan retained the ability to see past illusion, but it also became capable of high-speed perception, hypnotism and perfect recall. Your clan probably started out in a similar manner as well. Frankly, I would not be surprised if the Hyuuga and Uchiha shared some ancestry."

"The Uchiha used to say that we started out as a cadet branch that broke from the main family when our Sharingan started to mutate."

"Sounds plausible," Father Alexander said evenly. "Really would not surprise me much if it were true."

The conversation lapsed, and everyone waited for the next twenty minutes as Naruto searched for his Eye. "What is it?" the priest asked when Naruto frowned suddenly.

"I think I found it," he said uncertainly.

"Okay, now you need to be careful here. Gently hold that point in your mind and focus on it. Slowly make it bigger."

"Make it big-oh!" Naruto started to ask but cut himself off.

"Careful," Father Alexander warned. "Open it slowly, very slowly." The priest paused again. "Do you have it?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Then open your eyes, slowly."

There was a long pause as Naruto studied the priest, a queer look in his eye. "You're… different."

"Of course I am. You are looking at me with your second sight. Not with your Eye completely open, mind, but open enough to see a little of the true world. Now you have your Eye open, take a look at the town."

Naruto took a breath and turned to look at Jinna. And immediately turned away, wishing he hadn't, falling to his knees and emptying his tomach. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looking away and speaking. "It is covered in this fog, purple and black and green and yellow, roiling, almost alive." His face took on a distinctly unhealthy tone, closing his eyes. "I can't tell if there is anything causing it."

"That is good, very good. But we need to close your Eye before we go back into the town."

"Okay, how do I do that?"

"Close your eyes again. Take hold of your Eye and shrink it. Make it smaller, a prick and a glimmer, like it was before. It is not going to want to close, so you are going to have to force it."

Naruto nodded and closed his eyes again, face scrunching up in effort, but he opened his eyes again without reacting fifteen minutes later. "Good, now let us go see what you can see in the town." Father Alexander pushed himself to his feet and walked to the soldiers at the foot of the hill.

Naruto did not seem particularly excited about that, but did not say anything. Hinata and Tenten did not let his reaction go though, pulling him to the side. "Are you okay with this?" Hinata asked first.

"You don't have to do this if you don't want to," Tenten agreed.

"Yeah, this sounds really dangerous, Naruto-kun," Hinata said. "You just said that you would take a look, nothing more.

"No, this is something I have to. There are a lot of people that have gone missing here. We need to figure out what happened here, and I am the only one here that can do that right now."

"If you are certain," Hinata said, sounding doubtful, her expression mirrored by Tenten.

Naruto led the two women down to the base of the hill, proceeding back to the town with everyone in tow. Naruto took point at the ruined gate, everyone falling back about twenty feet as he paused to open his Third Eye. His physical eyes glazed over as he focused on what his second sight showed him, proceeding to lead everyone on a meandering tour through the town. He took it slow, head on a constant spin to make sure his Third Eye took in everything there was to see, taking turns as if they presented anything interesting to his sight, backtracking if necessary, finally stopping and closing his Eye in the square. The Fire soldiers spread out and formed a perimeter around the square while the shinobi, the priest and the sergeant gathered around Naruto.

"Well?" Jiraiya asked when he came to.

"There was definitely someone and a lot of somethings here."

"A lot of somethings?" Father Alexander asked, cocking an eyebrow at Naruto's choice of words.

Naruto shrugged and spread his hands in helplessness. "I don't know how else to describe the things I saw. They seriously looked like something out of a fantasy novel, big and hairy, like gorillas on two legs with dog-ears and snouts. They hand human hands, or at least human-like hands, and used a bunch of different kinds of melee weapons and bows. I couldn't get a good count, but I am guessing there were about a hundred, hundred twenty of the monsters total."

"How big were they?" Jiraiya had shifted his weight to his back leg, his left hand holding the elbow of his right arm, right hand holding his chin in a classic thinking pose. His thin white eyebrows were furrowed over his inward gaze, clearly searching his extensive knowledge trying to identify the things that Naruto had seen.

"It was kind of hard to judge exactly how tall they were because they didn't stand straight up very much, sort of half-hunched over while doing anything other than looking around or drawing back for a heavy overhead attack with a weapon. It seemed to me that their spines didn't grow straight like ours." Naruto looked up, eyes focused, but not at anything the others could see, a thought occurring to him. "It sorta looked like they used to move on all four legs at one time, but their backs didn't really adjust when they started walking on two legs for whatever reason." Naruto closed his eyes again and adopted a thinking pose, taking a minute to reexamine his memories before he continued. "Taking a better look at the things, their arms are clearly a good bit longer than their legs, almost able to lay the backs of their hands flat on the ground while squatting down. Hell, now that I really look, I can see that their torsos are almost ridiculously overdeveloped compared to their lower halves. Their legs are weird too, there is an extra joint pointing backwards between what would be the knee and an ankle on a person." Naruto paused for a second, another thought passing through his head. "They actually kind of look like something you would get if you crossed a dog or a wolf with a person in a movie.

"Anyways," he said with a mental shake, returning to the original question, "the small ones were pretty normal sized for monsters, the tallest ones not more than a head or two taller than the tallest of the villagers. There were a maybe a dozen or so individuals that were at least half again as tall as the small ones and one that was freaking gigantic, at least twice as tall as any of the people."

"You said they were hairy a moment ago. What kinds of colors was their hair, and did they wear armor or clothes?"

"Well, they were actually more furry than hairy, now that I think about it again. The small ones were all plain brown but the medium ones were grey, black or a weird fiery orange. The really big one was a really bright red, making it impossible to miss him. The little ones didn't wear much, a belt and loincloth, and a really thick piece of leather with spikes over one shoulder that tied under the other arm. The some of the medium ones just wore... I guess you'd call it a pauldron, but some of them actually wore armor, leather shirts, skirts, and vambraces, all studded with spikes as well, and some chainmail."

"And the big red one?"

"He was the only one that seemed to have any sort of plate armor. He seemed to have most of a full suit, a cuirass, spaulder, vambrace and a cuisse, each piece tied on separately with a couple heavy leather straps to hold everything on. Oh and a metal kettle hat too, with a wide brim and a huge spike on top."

"And the weapons, can you describe them better?"

"There didn't seem to be any kind of standard weapon, if that is what you were asking, but they were loaded for freaking bear. From what I saw, most of the monsters used some kind of melee weapon, but I want to say somewhere between a quarter and a third of the company carried bows, fairly normal sized and pretty uniform, from what I could tell.

"There were a few of the melee monsters that had crude maces, mostly looking like the monster-thing found a thick branch a couple of feet long and pounded a bunch of metal spikes through most of it.

"Most of the monsters that had proper weapons used swords, but there didn't seem to be many of the same kind. About half of them, as close as I could tell used some kind of straight blade, some like the one that Father Alexander uses and some that I could only call broadswords. Some of the bigger ones had these huge two handed, double-edged monstrosities, all of them with blades at least as long as I am tall. The rest of the sword-wielding monsters all had what I would describe as a scimitar of one flavor or another, about as varied as the straight swords were, the biggest ones having what I would call shotels if they didn't look like they could chop a decently-sized tree in one go. Some of the monsters with smaller blades also had small leather and spike-studded bucklers, about the size of one of their forearms, but really thick and heavy.

"I saw a couple of squads, somewhere between two or three dozen monsters using all-metal maces, morning stars and flails as well."

"I have to say I am a little surprised at how much you seem to know about their weapons and armor," Hinata said with some surprise.

Naruto shrugged. "Pretty much the only kinds of books that Mom could get me to want to read were ones about fighting in some way. The civilian library had about a dozen books on different kinds of weapons and armor that used to be used a long time ago, around the Third World War. There was this one on blacksmithing and weaponsmithing that I used to check out so often that the librarian would make me wait week or two before I was allowed to check it out again."

"Somehow, that doesn't come as much of a surprise," Tenten said dryly, crossing her arms over her chest and grinning at Naruto.

"Give me a break," Naruto replied with an eyeroll. "Frankly, between Mom, who could hardly be described as scholarly, and my admittedly crappy tolerance for learning anything that didn't have a direct application to fighting, you can hardly blame me for picking books about swords and stuff."

"I suppose we should be grateful that your mother managed to get you to sit down long enough to read at all," Hinata opined, a smile twin to Tenten's curving her lips.

"She had no problem with that," he informed her. "Mom just told me that I had to be able to read to go to the Academy." He shrugged. "Didn't really need much more motivation than that. It was never an issue of being able to read, just that there were much more interesting things to do instead of reading."

"Ahem," Jiraiya interrupted, covering his false cough with a fist, "may we return to the matter at hand?"

"Err… yeah. What did you ask me again?"

"I was going to ask about the big red one you mentioned."

"Its weapon... yeesh. It had what I swear to be the hugest fucking hammer that I have ever seen or heard about. It seriously looked like the ultimate weapon of the hero or final villain in a book or movie or video game or something. The thing was easily as tall as it was, all metal. The head alone was almost bigger than I am, and I can't even guess how heavy**. **I mean, this thing looked like it could be used to tear down a house or something."

That caused Jiraiya to cross his arms over his chest and furrow his brows. "So safe to say that the big red one is superhuman strong then?"

"From what I could see, even the small brown ones were pretty strong, able to drag even the men away without particular effort. The medium ones could carry any of the people over a shoulder or under an arm with the same ease.

"They seemed to be pretty well trained and disciplined, dragging people out into the street, but not really hurting them too much. I saw a few broken bones, a couple of the villagers knocked out, but nothing I would call excessive and certainly no slaughter. As far I could tell, none of the villagers were killed. Hell, I barely saw any blood spilled."

"So there seemed to be a purpose behind their attack then?"

"They could have easily razed the town and slaughtered the villagers, but they didn't. They were no simple beasts either, using what sounded to me like a fully developed language of their own to communicate between themselves. The red one at least seemed to be intelligent enough to have an equal conversation with the cloaked man, neither seeming to have any trouble understanding the other. Everything I saw seemed to point to them being just as smart as the average person." Naruto shrugged, unable to think of any other way to explain what he saw.

"You seemed to imply that they had some sort of chain-of-command as well. Is that true?"

"Mostly seemed to be a case of authority equals asskicking, the bigger ones in charge of the smaller ones. The red one took orders from the human, but otherwise seemed to be in charge of the rest. The middle-sized monsters looked to be the big red one's lieutenants, or at least they all took their orders directly from the big red one at the same time and then passed them on to the little ones as a group. There were only about a half-dozen of the medium-sized monsters, not enough for each group of the brown ones to have a direct commander, but they seemed to be able to operate in fire teams and squads without a clear leader."

"So they clearly have some measure of intelligence then."

Naruto shook his head. "It was more than they were intelligent; they were disciplined and organized. These things were clearly trained; they seriously acted like professional soldiers, not some ragged band of thugs." Naruto shook his head again, tone disbelieving, but unable to refute what he saw.

"Alright, Naruto, we believe you." Jiraiya obviously had as hard a time accepting what Naruto said, but had no choice but to do so.

"Can you tell us anything about how long they remained here, or in what direction they left?"

Naruto shook his head. "It wasn't like watching a movie or reading a book; things didn't happen chronologically. All I could get were bits and pieces of the attack, nothing consistent, and only the action-y parts. The monsters would just sort of fade into sight as they ran up to a house they were about to attack and then fade away as they carted the people off."

"You said that there was a person with the monsters too. Can you tell us anything about him?" Kurosaki asked this time.

Naruto shook his head again. "It was hard to see anything very clearly. I could see well enough to identify general features, but I couldn't see well enough to make out details, like tell how well the monster's equipment was maintained or villagers faces. There didn't seem to be anything unusual about the man in any case. Average height, white, dark hair. He didn't seem to be wearing any weapons or armor either."

"Still, it is more than we knew an hour ago," Hinata said with a shrug. "I don't suppose you can tell how long ago this happened?"

"Not by anything I saw."

"Don't worry about it. You have done good enough, Naruto. I will write the report up and toad messenger it to Mifune. Perhaps he will be able to shed some light on what has gone on here with what we know."

"Frankly, I am a little surprised you don't know what these things are, Ero-sennin."

"I don't recognize the specific contract, but they are clearly a demon summon of some kind."

"Are you absolutely certain these things are summons?" Father Alexander asked. "You yourself just said that you can't identify their contract."

"I don't think you realize how difficult creating a completely comprehensive list of every Contract in existence would be. Between the fact that most species can have anywhere between one to a dozen or more Contracts, that there are few animal summons with enough strength or charisma to compel their entire species to follow them and form a Boss Contract and how some villages are understandably secretive of which or how many Contracts they might have, it would be a nearly impossible task to do so. And that is not even taking the demon Contracts into account."

"I was unaware that they were so numerous," the priest said, genuine surprise in his tone.

"Few people do. Most think that they are some kind of ninja secret weapon, like the Jinchuuriki, but the truth is that summoning Contracts are not exceptionally rare."

"Well, going back to what I had to intended to say, from what little I know of the art, summons require a sacrifice of chakra in direct proportion to the number and strength of the summons summoned. If these things are indeed summons, that would imply that the robed man is the summoner. Judging solely by the number and apparent physical capabilities of these things, I do not think a single person could manage a summoning of this magnitude with less than Jinchuuriki-level strength. At the same time, I do not believe that a person capable of such a high level summon could pass Iron's borders without the Governor-General's knowledge."

"Do you have another possibility in mind? They are obviously not radbeasts, not with armor and weapons, so I don't know what else they could be."

"I think that these things have been summoned from the Seeing World. From Naruto-kun's description, I think that these things are gnolls, a type of mythical creature from before the Third World War."

"Well, there are sources I can have checked, as I am sure the good father can do the same."

"I can," the Cardinal agreed. "I have seen any number of weird things in my time, but I can say that this is new, even for me."

"Find out what you can, I guess." Jiraiya replied with a shrug. "We should probably make camp soon though," he said, noting the sun barely half its height above the horizon.

"This would be a good opportunity to train as well. I have not really given you much time as you have been focusing on lobbying for your Jinchuuriki group, as you should, but now it is time to continue your apprenticeship."

"Dinner will take me about an hour to prepare, so you have some time right now," Hinata informed the group.

"Dinner is going to have to wait. I want you both to sit in on this as well. Part of your jobs as his partners is to learn what his strengths and weaknesses are and how to use them against him. Plus, you will be learning how to make a containment seal tonight as well."

"If it is all the same to you, I would like to observe too."

Jiraiya looked to Naruto and nodded. "I want Hinata and Tenten to come along, and do need someone to monitor the seal, Hastings-san."

"What about activation? Chakra manipulation is not in my skillset."

"Not a problem. If you provide the blood, I can make a clone to provide the chakra."

"Sounds good to me," Alexander said with a shrug.

Jiraiya retrieved his large luggage scroll and unsealed a pot of ink and three brushes. The three teens followed Jiraiya off a short distance and helped him tear up grass to clear a patch of dirt, building a fire nearby to light their work. "Naruto already knows how to make a containment seal, so he is going to be teaching you how to make one tonight."

Jiraiya cut his palm with a kunai and clenched his fist, dribbling blood into the inkpot and shaking it to mix it. It took the two girls twenty minutes to scribe a ten-foot space under Naruto's direction, the blond boy explaining the purpose of each element as they drew them. Jiraiya waited until Naruto had examined their work before double checking the barrier and nodding in approval.

As usual, Naruto and Jiraiya were seated with legs crossed and knees touching, Tenten and Hinata seated crossways to them. The priest bit his thumb and Jiraiya's clone activated the seal. It glowed white for a moment, as it should, and then faded back to black, also as it should. Naruto folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes, Jiraiya placing his hand over his hara and the Dead Demon Consuming Seal, the girls' hands over his.

**Naruto's Mindscape**

Naruto's mindscape was as dreary as ever, although the stone didn't seem to quite so rough or the pipes so rusted and leaky. Kitsune, Naruto's gold-tipped tailed, snow white zanpakuto spirit gave a wide, tongue-curling yawn and a slight nod to Minazuki and Shrieking Fang, Hinata and Tenten's zanpakuto spirits respectively. It took less than a minute of splashing through the ankle-deep water for the four of them to arrive at the gigantic seal-bars. The sourceless light that filled the tunnel stopped an inch past the seal-bars, the demarcation like a blanket the color of a moonless night impeding all sense of that which lay beyond.

"Remember, this is your mind, your seal, your demesne," Jiraiya murmured into Naruto's ear. "You control everything that happens here, the Kyuubi only has as much power as you allow it to have."

A menacing, rumbling chuckle rolled out from the darkness accompanied by a pair of slitted eyes, yellow sclera, crimson irises and pupils the same shade as the surrounding darkness.

"**That is not entirely true, ape,"** the Kyuubi rumbled. **"This… seal holds me, binds my power, but it also twines my soul with his. He pulls on the door to my cage, I can push on it. He draws on my power, I give him more than he could possible handle."** Two massive claws emerged from the cage, slipping between the bars and digging at the stone floor. **"Come, ape. Try to master my power. Taste my rage and see if you can overcome it."** The Kyuubi let out another malevolently slow, rumbling chuckle and pulling its claws back behind the veil. **"Test me. See what happens."**

Naruto looked back over his shoulder at the others. They all nodded. Naruto took a breath and seated himself before the Kyuubi's cage, curling his hands into fists and pressing them together. He felt more than heard Kitsune slink up behind him and rest its head on his shoulder. He felt a hand on his back, so he turn to see Hinata and Tenten, with Minazuki and Shrieking Fang pressing against their arms, the two girls kneeling in the water, Tenten with a smile and Hinata with a wink, ready to give any support they could offer.

Naruto grinned, turning back to the seal-bars. "You want me to test you? I am not alone, Kyuubi. I have my family, my master here, all ready to do whatever it takes for me to control you. You want to see what happens? Let's see what happens."

Naruto closed his eyes, brows furrowing in concentration. Nothing happened for several seconds, absolute stillness reigning. Sound was the first change, the gentle echo of waves coming from the darkness beyond the seal-bars. A rushing wave of water burst forth a second later, not large, only a few inches, but the change in Naruto was profound.

The water in the tunnel barely covered Naruto's big toes at first, but the water from the Kyuubi's cage brought the level up to his knees. He pressed his lips together in a thin line as he accepted the chakra that the Kyuubi forced out and hunched his shoulders forward. Another small swell issued from the cage, and then something that could only be described as a tidal wave burst forth.

Rage red as blood washed over Naruto with the water. Naruto snarled and pressed his white-knuckled fists together as his body was flooded with god-killing power, world-murdering hatred. The urge to turn around and snap the necks of the two mewling bitches and the tired old man behind him was almost overpowering.

Hinata and Tenten each threw up a hand to shield themselves as the wave of chakra-water crashed over them, keeping their other hands on Naruto's back. The water stung, a thousand thousand pinpricks, each just enough to draw a single droplet of blood. Both girls grunted at the pain, but Naruto's continuing rough growl let them focus and push it away.

"Naruto! Naruto!" Hinata's voice was somewhat hoarse, but it cut through the sound of the rushing chakra-water well enough. "You have focus! Think, Naruto!"

"Remember the Code," Jiraiya instructed him, his voice effortlessly cutting through the noise, one hand on Tenten's shoulder and the other on Hinata's.

'_Remember why you are here,'_ Kitsune said, mouth opening wide in a tongue-curling yawn and set his head in Naruto's lap, the voice of the white-and-gold fox bypassing his ears and going directly to his mind.

Naruto gave no outward sign that he heard any of their words, but he straightened where he sat. The stinging pain the girls felt subsided to an uncomfortable prickle as the water ceased its torrential rush. Naruto floated upwards, positively buoyant in the chakra-water, Jiraiya, the girls and their zanpakuto spirits drawn along as Naruto rose to approximately head height for the Kyuubi.

The water did not fill the tunnel, only going about halfway to the rough stone ceiling, the red, slitted eyes of the Kyuubi faded into view as Naruto and the others broke the surface. Naruto grinned. "Hey there, fox." Naruto's eyes mirrored those of the Kyuubi, red irised and slit pupilled.

"**Little monkey thinks himself so clever, relying on others to bolster his flagging strength. How like a **_**human**_**," **the Kyuubi sneered, investing the last word with a world of scorn. **"Too weak to a thing on your own, you rely on others as weak as yourself to tear down those infinitely your greater."**

"That is where you are mistaken, Kyuubi. They are not here to lend me their strength; they are here to see me dominate yours."

The Kyuubi said nothing for several long seconds. **"If there is one thing I wish to learn before I die, it is where you humans get your hubris from. It is really quite insulting how you think that you, a barely trained, bawling infant like you can control me when neither your father nor the other could do it with their decades of knowledge. Arrogance is **_**the **_**defining trait of you humans."**

"It is only arrogance, only hubris if I can't control you. My father sealed you into me, and I have no idea who this other guy is but if my father could do it, then I know I can."

"**Your father did not control me, he sealed me. There is a significant difference between the two."**

"That difference is smaller than you might think."

"**Or it may be greater than you could imagine."**

Naruto gave the disembodied eyes a quick, confident smile. "I doubt that."

"**Only one way to find out."**

OoOoO

Outside the Kyuubi's prison in the real world, Cardinal Alexander Hastings knelt outside the seal, his sword the witchblade Iustiacchus, fully five feet from point to pommel, drawn from its sheath and driven half its length into the loose Iron soil. Father Alexander waited patiently as the four shinobi inside the seal did whatever it was that they had to do.

Father Alexander had not been particularly overjoyed when the Archbishop informed him that he was to accompany The Boy and his companions on his quest. The Urashima Military City compound was always headed by a Black Brother, the Order, small as it was compared to some of the Church's other institutions and agencies comprised of some of the most capable exorcists and seers in the Church's service. It had been a high honor to be selected to the head office of the prestigious Church compound outside Urashima Military City a decade ago, and he had not been terribly appreciative of being removed from his position.

Still, it wasn't like the trip had been a total loss. Interacting with the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki had been somewhat educational, especially the research he had done on The Boy's behalf. As a member of the Black Order, he was acquainted with shinobi Jinchuuriki and their like, but given the prohibition on international travel for Jinchuuriki the Hyuuga boy was the first that he had met. And he was not much like what he expected either. The Church kept files on the individuals possessed by the Black Souls, as much as was possible, but given the lengths that the Sandaime Hokage had taken to keep The Boy a secret, his dossier was rather thin.

Jiraiya was Jiraiya, but The Boy's two female companions were functionally anonymous. There were some assumptions that could be made of the Hyuuga girl, but the other one, Higurashi Tenten, was a complete unknown. He had not had the opportunity to evaluate their combat capabilities, but if they were half as capable as their partner, neither of them were to be trifled with. All three were young, but Naruto's status as Jinchuuriki alone meant that he possessed power well beyond his years, and every indication was that his partners did as well.

The Boy posed no threat to him, but his companions were an uncertain variable. Individually he was certain that he could overcome either one of them, but shinobi were a force multiplier, becoming stronger than the sum of their parts when working together. Still, he was a Black Brother, wielding one of the five most powerful witchblades in existence. If he could not overcome Naruto's two companions, then there was very little hope of anyone else short of the Grandmaster himself overcoming the trio.

Cardinal Hasting's thoughts were interrupted by the sudden eruption of demonic chakra within the seal. The malice of the red chakra, its directed, ill intent seeped through the barrier seal, inundating those nearby with feelings of hatred and rage. The priest glanced over to Jiraiya's clone, one hand settling on the hilt of his sword but remaining motionless otherwise.

"Clone-san?" Hastings asked after a moment as the chakra continued to flow unabated.

"It is under control, Father," the clone replied in a distracted tone. "This kind of thing was expected.

Cardinal Hastings said nothing, glancing down the hill to where some of the soldiers who were making camp were looking at the visibly manifested power being held back by the seal.

"Clone-san?" Cardinal Hastings asked again as he noticed a few of the seal-symbols starting to erode with a small, white flame.

"Everything is under control," the clone insisted, brows furrowed in an expression of intense concentration as he knelt forward, his hands placed on the edge of the seal.

Cardinal Hastings said nothing more, returning his attention to the four individuals in the seal. The raging torrent of chakra continued unabated for close to five minutes, the flow ceasing almost as suddenly as it begun. All five shinobi, the three teenagers, Jiraiya and his clone slumped in sudden, unexpected relief.

Jiraiya's clone dispersed itself after a moment, the original putting his hands to his knees and wearily pushing himself to his feet. "Is everything alright Jiraiya-san?" the priest asked in slight concern.

"Well enough, I suppose," the elderly ninja replied with a dismissive wave. "These things rarely go exactly to plan, but it went well enough. If you don't mind, could you ask Sergeant Kurosaki to send some food? I am afraid none of us are up to preparing a meal at the moment."

And that certainly seemed to be true enough. Each of The Boy's women each pulled one of his arms over a shoulder and half-dragged him to where their tents had already been set up.

"I see. I will speak to the sergeant."

"Thanks. Now if you do not mind, I have a few things I need to discuss with my students."

"Of course." Cardinal Hastings gave Jiraiya a short nod as he sheathed his blade.

Jiraiya bent and brushed aside the flap to the tent that his students had retired to, seating himself before the three worn-out teens. "That has to be the one of the most exhausting things I have ever done," Tenten said from where she had draped herself over Naruto. "It feels like I am sunburned in places you are never supposed to be sunburned."

"I have to agree," Hinata chorused. "That is one of the most unpleasant experiences I have ever had, and that is saying something."

"Now that you have actually faced the Kyuubi, witnessed the malicious intent of the Nine-Tailed Fox first-hand, does that change anything for either of you?"

Both girls fixed him with piercing glares that belied their exhaustion. "Fuck that," Tenten snapped, as Hinata said "It will take far more than a little intimidation from Naruto-sama's prisoner to scare either of us off."

"What she said," Tenten agreed. "I am pretty sure I speak for both of us when I say that we are even more dedicated to him now than ever before. We both knew Naruto-sama was strong, but never knew just how strong he was."

"Tenten is absolutely right. We have all heard stories about the Kyuubi, tales about its attack on Konoha, but to actually come face-to-face with it, to witness exactly what Naruto-sama has to deal with every single time he wields the Kyuubi's power. My respect, my admiration… my love for him… it goes beyond words." Jiraiya quirked an eyebrow at the sudden change in honorific applied to Naruto, but said nothing.

"Now, if you don't mind, we would like some privacy," Tenten told him, raising her head. "I need to change my clothes."

"You get turned on by that little show there?" Jiraiya asked with a lecherous grin.

"I believe the scientific term would be sopping wet," Tenten said with a grin of her own. Hinata did not comment, but the intensity of her blush seemed to indicate that Tenten was not the only one in need of fresh underwear. Naruto stirred slightly from where he had collapsed and issued a small grunt.

"Very well. Just keep in mind that either of you getting knocked up would be far from ideal at this point in time, not to mention the trouble that you could get into once we return to Konoha."

"Out!" Tenten screeched, thrusting a finger to the exit.

Tenten flopped back, Naruto grunting when her head drove into his stomach. "What did Jiraiya mean by that last comment?" Naruto asked.

"What, how we could get in trouble if you got either of us pregnant?"

"Yeah, that," Naruto answered with a small blush.

"You know we have to give five years of service to the village before we are allowed to retire, and are only allowed two weeks of leave a year?" Naruto nodded, looking up at her, his head pillowed on her thighs. "Well, maternity leave is considerably longer than two weeks." Naruto made a silent 'oh' of understanding at that.

"And what about what you said to Jiraiya? Are you two really…" he trailed off, unable to complete his sentence. Without a word, both girls took a hand and Naruto's eyes widened, whites showing all around his blue irises, finding out that yes, both girls were in dire need of fresh undergarments.

OoOoO

Hey, new chapter, and just in time for my birthday too! Happy twenty-three to me!

Made a few edits to chapter 7, changing Alexander's order to the Black Order/Black Brotherhood and made it a little clearer that there are only forty of them.

On a more serious note, snow is only good when it gets you out of school and you don't have to shovel it. Why anyone would want to live north of the Mason-Dixon Line is completely beyond me. My tender Georgian innards are not accustomed to this Pennsylvanian cold.

On the upside, I made my first snowman and snowfort the other day.

And lastly, snow is fucking cold…


	9. The Salin Investigation Part Two

**Chapter 9: The Salin Investigation Part Two**

As everyone in Naruto's entourage was a soldier of one stripe or another, breakfast was eaten and camp broken down by seven a.m. Jiraiya had sent a toad messenger to Mifune to report their findings and request additional instructions last night and it did not take Mifune long to reply to Jiraiya's report. Naruto and company were in the middle of eating a hot breakfast when the red-and-blue toad in question appeared in a puff of smoke. "Morning," the toad said with a casual wave.

"Hey Kosuke," Jiraiya said back. "Got a reply?"

"I do, but I don't think it says what you were hoping it was going to."

"Let me see it anyway." Kosuke nodded and withdrew a scroll from his abruptly oversized mouth. Naruto stood up and looked over Jiraiya's shoulder as he read it.

_Jiraiya-dono,_

_First, allow me to extend my thanks to you and your team for investigating and identifying the agency behind the disappearances of my soldiers and citizens of Salin, going well beyond what would be considered reasonable effort and risk to complete your mission._

_After having reviewed your report with my advisors, I must conclude that whatever these things are that your student claims to have seen, neither I nor my advisors have any information that would assist in either identifying or combating these creatures. I will direct my intelligence services to make the acquisition of any information pertaining to the identity, objectives or leadership of these creatures a priority of the highest level._

_At this point, I have determined you to have fulfilled all relevant parameters of your mission and hereby release you from any further obligation in this matter._

_In My Hand  
Mifune  
Governor-General of Iron_

"Well, I guess we are done here then," Tenten said with a note of surprise in her voice after Naruto passed the scroll to her and Hinata.

Naruto shook his head. "No, not yet. We have barely begun to figure out what is going on here."

"Mifune said that we had done everything he asked us to, we don't have to do anything more," Hinata told him in an all-to-reasonable tone.

Naruto shook his head. "Mifune had no idea what was going on here until we investigated. It is highly unlikely he would have found anything out had we not come. We have a better chance than anyone Mifune sends to stop these things."

"That might be true, but Mifune might not like it if we stay after he has told us to leave."

"Tenten has a point," Jiraiya said with a short nod. "If you insist on staying though, you better be the one to send the toad. I would suggest you make it sound like a request rather than like you are informing him though."

"Noted," Naruto replied dryly.

"You have to keep in mind that Mifune may not allow you to continue your investigation though. We will have to leave the country if he tells us to, whether or not you want to."

"Yeah, I know. But like I said, I am the only reason why he has any idea what is going on here. I don't think he would turn us down if we were offering to help solve this mystery, especially as we are not charging him anything."

Jiraiya shrugged. "If you insist. You want to put your Jinchuuriki thing off to keep pushing this, it is your prerogative."

Naruto didn't say anything back to Jiraiya, instead turning to Hinata. "You want to write this out for me? My handwriting isn't that great, and it would be kinda bad if he had trouble understanding my letter."

"I don't think your writing is quite that bad Naruto-sama, but I can do that for you."

"Cool." Naruto unfurled his luggage scroll and unsealed a smaller scroll and pen, handing them off to Hinata and started dictating.

_Mifine-dono,_

_Having received your message regarding your decision per our involvement in the Salin investigation I find I am not personally satisfied with our findings and would like to offer the services of both myself and my team to the successful resolution of this matter to the full and complete satisfaction of all parties involved without cost to yourself. With respect to both yourself and the men under your command, between the unique skills of both myself and my shinobi team and the elite nature of my Fire escort, I believe that my team is both better placed and better equipped to deal with this threat._

_If your Lordship finds this an agreeable arrangement or not, send reply back by toad at your earliest convenience._

_Hyuuga Naruto  
Captain Fire Country Legion  
Chunin Konohagakure_

Naruto read over what he had Hinata write for him before nodding and rolling the scroll up and handing it to the waiting Kosuke who promptly swallowed it and dematerialized in a small puff of smoke.

"How long do you think it'll take to get an answer?" Naruto asked nobody in particular.

Jiraiya stroked his chin. "He will be expecting your reply, so two, three hours max."

"What should we do until his reply comes?"

"Training comes to mind," Jiraiya said.

"I could use a good stretch," Naruto admitted.

"Probably been a while since you had a serious training session, eh?" Jiraiya replied with a gleam.

"You pick now of all times to find your inner teacher sadist?" Naruto asked as Tenten punched him in the arm hard enough to leave a bruise with a scowl.

"'Find' my inner sadist? Try 'woke up.'"

"Thanks Naruto," Tenten growled. "I don't mind working up a bit of a sweat, but I am not ready to deal with another one of Anko's bare-knuckle pain routines.

"I never thought Mom's sessions were that bad."

"Well first of all, you're her son, so you probably grew up with it and two, you were not the one she got to put all her attention on for a month-long training regimen."

"Good, at least one of you knows what to expect."

That elicited nothing but flat looks from his erstwhile students.

Jiraiya started them off with a forty-five minute run around Jinna.

"Warmed up yet," Jiraiya asked lightly. Before any of the trio got the chance to answer he leaped at Naruto, cocking back a fist and releasing a shout of "defend yourself!"

Naruto threw himself into a backflip, leaping several feet away, reflexively sidearming a kunai at the spot Jiraiya would land at. Hinata and Tenten only took another half-second to land, blade and guns out, faltering as they came in line with Naruto and Jiraiya.

"What are you doing?" Naruto asked, ducking under another fist.

"Stop me if you want me to!" Jiraiya yelled, abruptly breaking away to charge at Tenten. She fired as he closed, unable to believe her eyes when he body flickered through the bullet. A split-second before Jiraiya would have been close enough to strike, Hinata moved, interposing her blade between Tenten and Jiraiya, her body sliding in behind the block.

Hinata met his neutral look with a fearless scowl. She folded one hand behind her back and slid her back foot just slightly out of line with her front. The tip of her rapier was a gleaming point of infinite sharpness, the edge of her blade keen as her will. Her jacket was discarded, a short-sleeved, form-fitting black t-shirt tucked into navy blue pants revealing a brace of senbon and bracers on each arm. Naruto grinned at the new addition to her arsenal. She had told him that she didn't use senbon often because her eyes were not good enough to see the tenketsu at range, but her ability to perceive them had been increasing a little recently. Maybe her eyes had gotten better than he had realized. He gave a mental shrug. Either way was good news.

Tenten emptied four more chambers at Jiraiya, throwing herself to one side to get a clear line of fire. Jiraiya leaped straight up as Hinata thrust at the same time, flipping up and over Hinata and landing behind her, front leg slipping around the other to dodge a Jyuuken needlepoint stab from the Hyuuga kunoichi.

"And to make it interesting," Jiraiya said with a grin when he saw Naruto recover himself and charged, dodging around Hinata. His hands came together in the shadow seal, the seal for the shadow clone, two more Jiraiyas exploding into existence and moving toward Tenten and Naruto. Tenten dropped her pistols, barely getting her sword between Jiraiya's stab and her face. She uttered her command phrase a moment later, the sword transforming into twin, chain-linked bladed tessen. Tenten threw a loop around Jiraiya next punch, using it to add extra power to the side kick she aimed at his short ribs. The master ninja caught it and used it to immediately sling her into into the ground.

Naruto faltered for a moment when he saw Jiraiya slam Tenten into the ground, knocking her out cold. He dropped his guard just enough that Jiraiya was able to land a hit. "What the hell?" Naruto demanded.

"You don't want me to hurt Hinata-chan? Then stop me!" he repeated.

Naruto glared at Jiraiya. Whatever was going on, some sort of real world door-die situation training he supposed, he was willing to give Jiraiya everything he was looking for and then some. Exhaling to relax, he embracing the anger flickering at the edges of his mind, fanning the embers into an instantaneous bonfire of rage, the words "deaden, deafen, blind… FLASH! KITSUNE!" rolling almost unconsciously from his lips. The Kyuubi cloak rose in response, mirroring his seizure of the Kyuubi's power.

Naruto threw his sword up long enough to form the shadow seal, catching the hilt as an even dozen clones appeared, half rushing over to where Hinata and Tenten were. Three of the clones that stayed immediately charged, Rasengans tearing through the air. Two more donned their Garments of the Dead and flash stepped behind him, Typhoon Palms reaching to try to pin or slow him enough for one of the Rasengans to land. Jiraiya barely blinked, instantaneous execution of the Body Flicker Technique ensuring that the clones destroyed each other.

Naruto had taken the opportunity to go after Hinata though. Hinata had attacked her Jiraiya as it approached, leaping forward, point reaching for his eye. He continued grinning as he body flickered away from Hinata's attack as well. The clone was beset upon by Naruto and the six clones, one executing a spinning leap that would have sent a physical person's head flying, destroying the Jiraiya clone.

That only bought them a moment of respite. The Naruto clones leaped away, attacking Jiraiya and his. Instead, one got his throat crushed and a second was thrown into a third, destroying both. Hinata lunged through the smoke but a Jiraiya slapped her thrust aside and threw a fourth Naruto clone at her. She coughed at the detonation, buying Jiraiya a moment to focus on Naruto. One of Jiraiya's clones had gone down, swarmed by their counterparts.

Jiraiya intercepted a fist, broke its owners elbow and throwing him back a moment before he exploded. A side kick from the other Jiraiya gave him a fresh punching bag, and another projectile to throw at Hinata.

"Come on you little shits, stop holding back on me. Show me what you can really do!"

"He already knocked Tenten out," Hinata said quietly.

"And he did say to bring it," Naruto growled, more to himself than to Hinata.

"He did at that," Hinata agreed.

"Then let's show him what he wants to see," the blond declared. He took note of the crowd of soldiers that was gathering at the foot of the hill, watching them spar. He would just have to try to keep the fight on their side of the hill. Naruto loosened the firm hold he had on his Kyuubi-induced rage, letting the fire burn hotter.

Hinata did not release Mizuki into shikai, but she did don her Hollow mask. Naruto quirked an eyebrow at that, wearing her mask so soon, but figured that the fact that she had done so meant that she could hold it for a usably long time. Naruto had already released his zanpakuto, not that he had been able to ensnare Jiraiya with a flash, but the longer reach well worth the tradeoff in speed.

At some unseen signal both teens blitzed him. Hinata's was actually impressive, equal to or a hair quicker than Naruto's flash step. Jiraiya actually leaped away from Hinata, having to dodge her predictable lunch as well as the stage-two Rasengan in her open hand. Jiraiya gave an approving nod as he gathered the chakra for a Fire Release: Flame Bullet to spit at Naruto. The spit of flame splashed up against his kosode, the sleeve catching fire. He immediately broke away, tearing the burning cloth from his arm, ripping the sleeve off entirely, revealing the singed white fabric of his shitagi beneath. Jiraiya took the opportunity to gang up on Hinata. He drove a roundhouse into her side, cracking ribs, staggering her and breaking her mask. That broke her guard completely, allowing him to drive a hard right to her chin.

"Ready for your nap?" Jiraiya asked lightly.

Naruto said nothing, rising to the balls of his feet, ready to move. Jiraiya juked first left, then right, wearing a nasty smile. Naruto threw him away from a drop kick that cracked the ground when it landed. He ducked to dodge a sweeping roundhouse then rolled forward, a kunai nicking his ear. He whirled around in a crouch only to catch a glimpse of a sweeping foot before his vision exploded.

OoOoO

"You have a heavy hand when teaching."

Jiraiya turned to look at Cardinal Hastings. "Father. They said they wanted to take the fight to Akatsuki. I am just giving them an object lesson on what it means to be an S-ranker."

"Not a lesson they will forget, I imagine."

"No, it is not. God, I forgot how stupid kids could be."

"You can hardly fault them for their youth, Jiraiya-dono," Hastings chided.

"I can do anything I want. I'm a ninja; it's practically a rule."

"Hm. If you say so."

"I do. Now if you don't mind, I have students to lecture."

"I ran the Black Order's Fire Country preceptory before I was reassigned to babysit your student. Would you mind if I joined in?"

OoOoO

"You're dead."

Naruto repressed a flinch, the point of the Acolyte's sword an inch from his throat. Repeated _thunk_ing came from his right where Jiraiya was throwing a kunai into ground above Hinata's head, laid out beside him.

"Dead dead dead," Jiraiya echoed. "So young and so dead."

"Is there a point to this?" Naruto groaned and rolled to a sitting position, jerking to look over as Jiraiya slapped Hinata and Tenten awake. Jiraiya ignored the glares the three sent his way, rubbing bruises and fractures.

"Do you know what your first mistake was, as a team?" The three teens remained silent. "You were not trying to kill me. Naruto, you want to take Akatsuki head on, match strength with strength. You want to know what it feels like to face an S-class shinobi? That was barely A-rank, a bit of taijutsu, that's all. And a little taijutsu is going to be the least of the things you will face, were I Itachi or Kasame or Hidan."

Jiraiya straightened, idly twirling a kunai by the ring. "This is how things are going to be from now on. You are going to come after me and not stopping until you draw blood. You are going to try to kill me when we train or this is going to be a familiar ending for you three."

Jiraiya pushed himself to his feet. The kunai buried itself in the turf less than an inch from his right ear. "Now let's see what you can do with that."

OoOoO

Mifune's reply was prompt; Kosuke returning with the Governor-General's answer less than two hours after Naruto had written his letter.

_Captain Hyuuga-san,_

_If it is your desire to continue to pursue this matter to its conclusion I find I am not opposed to to you doing so. After reviewing reports from Salin's capital garrison I would suggest that you take your investigation to Sumra, a nearby town somewhat larger than Jinna with the company garrison responsible for the surrounding area. The Sumra garrison was the last unit in the district to fall out of contact before anyone started investigating, being the smallest of Salin's eight satellite garrisons._

_In My Hand  
Mifune  
Governor-General of Iron_

"Do either of you know where this Sumra is?" Naruto asked the two adults of his coterie.

"North and a little west of here. Not precisely the direction of Sand," Jiraiya told him.

"Still, this has gotten my interest. I want to know exactly what happened here and put an end to whatever it was that did this."

"Father, could you let the soldiers know we have a destination?" Hastings didn't say anything, just giving a shallow nod and leaving, Jiraiya a second later.

Conversation lapsed as the three of them tore down their part of camp. Naruto paused, pulling the supporting poles apart.

"Do you guys actually mean it, calling me Naruto-sama?" he asked after a few minutes

The two women exchanged a look at Naruto's question, hands falling still. "Of course we mean it," Hinata told him.

Tenten stood. "That… thing, that force… it is beyond comprehension, it boggles the mind."

"Having to control that thing every time you use its power is incredible, almost beyond belief. You do the most amazing things every time you fight. You defeat, and then befriend enemies anyone else would just kill."

"And you love us, as we do you. And that is the most amazing thing of all," Hinata continued, her voice decreasing as the space between them did the same.

"So yes Naruto-sama, we mean it," Tenten finished, her tongue tracing the outside curve of his ear.

"I believe you," Naruto replied at her volume.

"Good," Hinata replied in a normal, brisk tone, going back to what she was doing, as did Tenten.

The Fire soldiers took another ten minutes to finish packing up. The open terrain of the Iron plain facilitated quick travel, the shinobi the slower of the two groups for once.

Sumra was not far, as the crow flew, one day's hard march to arrive at the much more impressive Sumran gates. Sumra was a fort-town, the fort constructed on an abbreviated rise with the town surrounding it. The gates of the town were built of ten foot hardwood beams set into a fifteen foot palisade, ringed by a shallow moat lined with short spikes, likely scraps from the woodworkers shop.

One of the doors was hanging from a single massive hinge, the other twenty feet down the street a scorchmark covering most of the doors front faces. That was the just the most obvious sign of battle though. The walls were intact, but blood showed. The turf around the town was scuffed, torn and a good portion of the spikes in the moat were broken or gone.

As Jinna was, so was Sumra. Naruto and his squad entered the fort-town, creeping along the main boulevard towards the fortress proper. Some buildings were burned to the ground, as they were in Jinna, and some were untouched, also as they were in Jinna. There would be six buildings in a row untouched, and there would be a whole block of nothing but cold ashes. There were scorchmarks on street corners, large ones that would be made by bonfires.

The bodies were missing, as they had been in Jinna, not a single person, living or dead in the entire town. The fort's main wall was breached in a single location, the main gates literally blown down. The fort had been ransacked, the armory and food stores pillaged and empty.

Naruto and his men had split up as they had when searching Jinna, scattering throughout the fort-town, regrouping and doing the same for the fort proper. Jiraiya had found the commander's quarters and operations room. A clone dispersed to inform the real one, Team Nine assembling in the command room.

"Find anything interesting?" Naruto asked as he entered.

"Not yet. There was obviously an extended battle in the town, but I am not finding any paper on it. There are some maps out, showing the defenses and whatnot, but nothing that would let on what happened here.

Naruto growled. "Not good news then?" Hinata asked as she entered

"No. Big fat goose egg is all we got, just like in Jinna."

"What about… you know."

"I don't really want to use my Sight unless I have to. Looking at Jinna with it was bad enough. If we could find out anything without me having to look, that would be nice.

"Unfortunately, I find that to be an unlikely proposition, Naruto. There is nothing of use here."

Naruto scowled, but said nothing. Ten minutes proved Jiraiya wrong though. It turned out that there had been a single survivor.

Tenten entered the command room with two Fire soldiers restraining a third man.

"Names?"

"Lance Corporal Haiba Sumiyo and Corporal Sekitani Kim, sir," the first of the two Fire soldiers said. "We were searching the fort as we were ordered with Sergeant Higurashi when we found this man on one of the bastions." Tenten nodded when he gave her a look.

"Private Noburo Minaka, in His Excellency the Governor-General Mifune's service, lord captain." The man had been forced to his knees, the two corporals each with a hand on his shoulders.

"And what are you two doing? He is not a prisoner, he is a witness. Let him up now. My name is Hyuuga Naruto, chunin of Konoha and a captain in the Fire Legion. I have been tasked by your lord to investigate the disappearing towns in this district. Tell me, do you know what happened here?"

"You would not believe me if I told you. I scarcely believe it and I was here."

"He saw them, Naruto-sama, the monsters that sacked Jinna," Tenten told him.

"Monsters, part dog, part gorilla, part human, brown and white and red?" Naruto asked.

"How could you possibly know that?" the Iron private asked in turn.

"Like I said, Mifune sent me out here to find out what was going on. That is what I have been doing. Tell me what happened here."

"Honestly, I do not know much, lord. We had been hearing rumors over the last few weeks about large animals or monsters hiding in the countryside, farmers cows, goats and sheep being raided, some losing half a flock in a single night, all without anyone noticing anything. Then we lost contact with Fort Imran, the closest Iron garrison to us four days before the attack.

"It was night when they struck, must have been three, four in the morning. First thing I know is the alarm bells are ringing and half the town is ablaze. Those things were everywhere, seemed like there was hundreds of them, but couldn't have been more than two hundred if I had to hazard a guess. I think they had a wizard or sorcerer or something with them, because something blew up the gates to the town and the fort. Biggest fireball I ever saw, must have been ten feet across before it blew the doors down. I saw it from the barracks."

"What about after? Did you see which way they went with their prisoners?"

"Prisoners? South, lord. Fort Imran perhaps. It is in that direction."

"You sure they went south?" Jiraiya interrupted.

The private nodded. "I watched from the bastion. They came here with a purpose, taking as many prisoners as they could and to resupply and rearm. The only buildings they burned were those with people in them. Went straight for the magazine and foodstores when they got into the fort. It took them three days to get into the fort though."

"You say they were here three days and that they took everyone prisoner, correct?" Hinata asked. The private nodded. "How did you escape? Could there be anyone else in the town or fort that could have done the same?"

"I couldn't say, lady. I can only plead luck that I was missed. I was on the wall when the monsters made their final assault. That wizard had disappeared after blowing up the gate on the first morning of the attack. He turned up again to blow down the gate and then helped in the attack. He seemed to blow anything up that he ran across."

Naruto sighed. "Alright. Tell me what you know about this Fort Imran."

"Pretty much the same as this one. Fort Sumra and Fort Imran are frontier forts, the first line of defense. Small, lightly fortified, we are more scout stations than true garrisons. Small civilian town surrounding the fort itself." Noburo shrugged. "Not much else to tell."

"What about alarms? How come you didn't let anyone know what was going on?" Tenten asked.

"At first, all we had were country rumors. There wasn't any evidence that there was actually something out there. We let the capital know that Fort Imran fell out of contact, but that was everything we knew. Once the monsters appeared, none of our hawks could make it out of town. They were all shot down, even the ones we let off at night."

That caused everyone to exchange looks. "So they can see at night as well," Naruto said flatly. "This just keeps getting better and better." He sighed. "And you say that this is the most likely place for them to be hiding?'

"Assuming that they are looking for a base and don't already have a base already."

"Sounds like we have a target then. But we could not get there before night fell. Sergeant Kurosaki, gather your men. We are staying the night. We leave before dawn. With any luck, we will get to this Fort Imran as the sun rises. I would like to make a dawn strike, if they are actually there." Kurosaki gave a sharp nod and departed.

"We will be able to tell whether they are actually there easily enough, what with your Byakugan."

Hinata nodded. "We will at that."

"I don't suppose you have any maps of Fort Imran?" Tenten asked Noburo.

"I don't see why we would but could not say for certain, lady. I am just a private; I walked patrol, I did not discuss strategy with the fort commander. If we don't, Fort Sumra's plans should be a close copy."

"Hinata?" Tenten asked.

She shook her head. "I can't pick out that level of detail. Sorry."

"Ah whatever. We will just have to sort through them all."

"Do you have a medic?" Jiraiya asked the two Fire soldiers.

"We do," the right one said.

"Have your medic take a look at him. Keep two men with him at all times. You are not a prisoner," Jiraiya told the Iron private, "but this will lessen the chance for any mistakes to occur."

Noburo nodded. The Fire soldiers took him away.

It only took a couple of minutes to sort through all the paper in the room, a half-dozen Narutos speeding the process up considerably.

"HA!" Tenten exclaimed five minutes later.

"You found it," Naruto asked.

"Yep," She said, spreading the map in question out on the table. As Noburo had said, the fort was not an impressive defensive fortification. Two palisade walls with a shallow moat did not make for the most impressive defenses. With only a single platoon to man the fort, there would be little they could do if faced an enemy with just a small band of fighters."

"If these things are actually there, it might be a better idea to let Mifune and his army deal with them. We're talking about over a hundred of these creatures, who have sacked at least two towns without showing signs of significant casualties." Hinata crossed her arms under her breasts. "This might be an enemy that we can't beat without reinforcements."

"Let's see what the situation is before we get a division of Iron troops."

"Very well, Naruto-sama," she said with a sigh.

OoOoO

"They are definitely here," Hinata told Naruto and the group.

The grey light of the predawn was growing as Jiraiya, Father Alexander, Sergeant Kurosaki and Team Nine peeked out a copse of trees just two hundred yards from the occupied Fort Imran. "What can you see?"

Hinata's brows were furrowed in concentration, focusing her eyes on just the fort. "Nothing you are going to like hearing. The prisoners are here. Looks to be maybe a hundred civilians and twenty soldiers. They have them split up, in two different areas. There are bodies as well."

"How many?" Naruto asked quietly.

"Thirty, maybe thirty five. They were killed by a single weapon, a two-edged knife." She paused for a moment, Father Alexander murmuring a quick prayer. "I see the man. Robes, short hair. It's dark around him. Very strange."

"Can you see anyone being tortured or anything?" Father Alexander asked.

"No, but there is only one room I can see in. If I had to wager, I would say that is where they are being killed. No signs of slaughter anywhere else." Naruto hm'ed but did not say anything, waving Hinata to continue to report what she saw.

"The gnolls seem to be mostly in the fort itself. There are a handful of sentries on the walls, but nothing that should hamper us."

"Can you tell how many gnolls there are?" Kurosaki queried.

"Only a hundred or so all in the courtyard. Don't seem to be many injuries." Hinata turned her head slightly, searching the fort. "Can't find an infirmary at least."

"What about the big red one that I saw?"

"Way inside the fort, near the center." A pause. "That is a really big hammer. On the upside, the fort seems to match the blueprints of Fort Sumra."

"Well at least we will know where we are going when we attack."

"Attack Naruto-sama?" Tenten asked. "I am not one for running from a fight most of the time, but this is a fight I would not mind leaving to Mifune."

"It will take days for Mifune to get anyone out here. Those prisoners do not have days. We take the fort now. Sergeant, get your men ready. You are to hold fire until you must. Surprise is on our side. I would like to avoid a head-on confrontation for as long as possible."

"Yes sir," Kurosaki growled, snapping a reflexive salute.

Naruto and the others waited while Kurosaki organized his men. He gave a soft hoot three minutes later, Naruto doing the same, signaling for all to advance. Everyone crawled through the waist-high grasses, Naruto passing within plain sight of one of the wall guards, backlit by the low-hanging moon as he passed through the ruined gate. There were not many, the one by the gate the only one he saw.

Tenten flicked a kunai at it and it tumbled off the wall. Hinata made sure it was dead when it landed and then the gate was open. The outer half town was completely deserted, ransacked but not occupied. Approximately fifty gnolls had taken up residence in the buildings immediately surrounding the single gate's plaza.

"Jiraiya, you seeing what I am seeing?"

"Yeah, I am Naruto."

"Hinata-chan, where are the prisoners?"

"They are keeping the civilians outside the fort, the soldiers inside."

Naruto's scowl was almost audible. "So we have to go through them to get the hostages."

"Or we could go around and take out the leadership, then come down and get the civilians while they are disorganized," Sergeant Kursosaki suggested.

"I like that idea a lot more," Tenten agreed.

"I never said we had to go straight through," Naruto protested. "Kurosaki, can you and your men make a silent entry?"

There was a metallic clicking, the soldier affixing a bayonet to his rifle. "We are not ninja, but we do know how to be silent, when the occasion requires it."

"Good. Set your men up around the gnolls in the outer courtyard. We will sneak in, extract the soldiers and then make a concentrated move on the civilians."

Kurosaki gave a double-click of acknowledgement. Naruto met up with Jiraiya and the two girls at the rear of the fort, Father Alexander electing to go with the soldiers.

Scaling the wall was hardly an effort, Tenten burying kunai in four guards' eyes or throats, Hinata taking care of the other two.

According to Hinata, most of the gnolls had gathered with the prisoners in the main cafeteria, with some of the bigger ones in individual quarters. The very largest, the red beast, had guards outside his room and the wizard's. The ninja padded through unguarded halls, letting Hinata guide them towards the cafeteria.

"This has to be perfect," Jiraiya told them as they split up around the cafeteria. Everyone clicked once as they got in position, maintaining radio silence even though the gnolls were unlikely to have radio equipment to intercept their signal, but their hearing was an unknown variable, and even low voices could carry.

Naruto double-clicked his mic, the signal for them to attack. There were a few lanterns lit, near the other end of the cafeteria where the prisoners were chained up. The gnolls slept on the bare floor without cover, like animals, so it was just a matter of clamping the gnoll's muzzle closed and slitting its throat. He estimated that it took them almost five full minutes to make their way to the other end of the room. The next gnoll he grabbed was either not as asleep or merely more aware than the others, but he made a small grunt before Naruto could get his grip around the thing's muzzle.

The guards for the prisoners were drowsing, but one heard the noise and straightened, becoming alert. It searched the darkness for a moment before spotting Jiraiya and his white hair.

It roared. There was nothing intelligible in the sound and pointless besides. Tenten picked two off with her rifle back in the darkness before Naruto or Hinata reached them. Hinata took the first two gnolls to come at her by sliding low, hamstringing them with Minazuki, thrusting her needle blade through the thing's in a fully extended lunge and slashed the throat of the other.

Naruto created six clones, hammering four gnolls down with bare fists, a bullet tearing through one of their throats and the other three losing their heads.

And as sudden as that, it was twelve in for, instead of twenty. It took the gnolls a moment, but they reacted to the human attack with impressive speed. The gnoll that gave the alarm drew its blade from where it lay sheathed on the floor. Naruto met it swing and stopped it cold with some effort. Hinata came out of a leap and drove her rapier through the throat from the side. Her sleeve had ridden up and exposed the senbon on her right forearm. Her hand passed over the metal needles and they disappeared in a glimmer and shine. Another went down, bullet drilling through its temple. And then there were eight.

One of the still shapes of the dead gnolls humped up, a gnoll not quite dead lunging at Tenten. Its curved sword marked the barrel of her rifle, Tenten stepping back and swinging the butt of her rifle into the side of its head. She dropped her gun, one end of her transformed zanpakuto wrapping around the gnoll's calf, wrenching its leg up and sending it crashing down. She was on it in an instant and it head was rolling away.

Hinata ducked a wide swing by a gnoll, Minazuki entering under its ribs, spearing its heart, puncturing a lung and exiting out under its neck. Hinata withdrew her zanpakuto and took the and took the hand off another. Naruto speared it through the heart and deflecting an overhead strike aimed at Hinata. He saw Tenten fend off the gnoll that hadn't been quite dead out of the corner of his eye, ducking to parry a hammerswing over his head.

Jiraiya leaped in all of a sudden and took out the last six in two seconds, dual Rasengan and kunai. "Well done," he said in a jovial tone.

"And without you, I might add." Naruto sounded annoyed, tone matching Hinata and Tenten's crossed arms.

"What was that, anyways? You were just behind me when Naruto signaled."

"There weren't that many of them and it was a good way to test you, seeing how you would react when having to operate on bad intelligence. You expected me to assist when I didn't. Could you handle it?"

"And did we?" Tenten asked acerbically.

"With colors," the master ninja replied tone unchanged.

"Should we expect more of these tests? Hinata asked, voice sharp as her blade.

"Nah," Jiraiya replied lightly. "You passed it, no need to test ya again."

Hinata harrumphed.

Tenten stepped away drawing one of her sidearms. "We need to get out of here. The wizard and officers may have heard the growl or gunfire." There were four cages, four shots to free the men within.

"Who are you?" one of the men asked, rubbing his recently freed wrists. Jiraiya freed each man as he came out.

"Captain Hyuuga Naruto, on loan to the Governor-General from Fire."

"Lieutenant Yoshimori, of the Governor-General's Service, Shinobi-san."

Naruto gave a slight nod. "General Jiraiya and Sergeants Higurashi and Hyuuga. Lieutenant, how are you and your men? Can you march?"

"Bruises and a broken arm, Captain. Most of us can handle firearms if you have any."

"I have another Winchester Model '73, and a pair of Pattern '53 Enfields. Do your men know how to operate front-loading guns?"

"They do. Repeating firearms are not that old a concept. I assume you have ammunition?"

"Some. Ten or fifteen rounds per gun. Thirty rounds was always more than sufficient for myself."

"That should do. I will just have to instruct my men to pick their shots."

"You still have your old guns with you?" Naruto asked.

She shrugged. "Don't take up much space in a scroll, and never saw the point in getting rid of them. Can your men use knives, throw kunai?"

"We train with bayonets. I wouldn't count on much by the way of ranged support."

"Well, at least you will not be fighting unarmed." The lieutenant nodded.

Tenten armed the men on the move, Hinata noticing movement near the wizard's location. She split her 38-40 ammunition, the rounds her repeaters used even between herself and another sergeant, the unit's sharpshooter. The two men using her Pattern '53s got fifteen rounds apiece and everyone received three kunai. That about drained her stockpile, arming twenty-three men. They could hear what was presumably the red gnoll roaring on the other side of the fort. Jiraiya led the way, looking for a good spot to ambush their pursuers. He found it out by the east side of the wall, Tenten and the soldiers using her guns up on the walkway built into the palisade, Naruto, Hinata, Jiraiya and the kunai-wielding infantrymen flanking the egress.

The big red must have sensed something though and swung his hammer, taking out a good part of the walls surrounding the door leading outside. Two of the former prisoners were killed instantly, the monstrous hammer smashing their heads and chests. There were several clones interspersed with the Iron soldiers, managing to get the rest away from the cloud of debris.

"Hold fire!" Tenten ordered, mindful of their limited ammo. The dust and debris took a couple seconds to settle, and then the big red stepping out into the growing light. It was massive in every dimension, its maleness ill concealed through its brown leather pants. It was the better part of ten feet, towering over Jiraiya. Its muscles bunched powerfully as it tossed the incredible weight of its eight foot warhammer with deadly casualness. One, maybe two strikes is all it would need to kill any of them, even Naruto, and even a glancing hit would do serious damage.

The butt of it warhammer thumped into the dirt and Tenten was ordering for her men to fire. Four firearms cracked with near simultaneousness. The big red gnoll brought its hammer down, one shot spanging off the flat side, one catching it low in the side, the third in the meat of its left thigh and the last taking one of the four orange, black and white lieutenant gnolls right between its eyes.

The big red ignored the bullets, roaring and taking a heavy step towards the soldiers on the ground. "On the small ones!" Tenten ordered her riflemen, and killed the black one. The orange and one of the two white gnolls managed to get back into the hallway with uncertain wholeness.

The clones grabbed the Iron soldiers again and pulled them back to safety while the flesh-and-blood ninja went under or over the hammer. Hinata bounced straight up off the front face of the hammer, landing and leaping forward at the thing's head, taking an inch off one of its ears with her zanpakuto.

"Fire Release: Toad Oil Flame Bullet!" A glob of golden oil splashed against the gnoll's chest, the flames roaring as it traveled. It screamed, a base, animal sound. The sound caught the air and threw it out, a wave of force, staggering Naruto and the others. It slammed the hammer into the ground, making the ground jump and break for ten feet as the fire burned on its chest. Having bought itself a slight reprieve, it spat into a paw and smeared over the patch of burned skin, extinguishing the flame. A bullet burrowed into the meat of its shoulder and one lower in its side, matching the other wound. A dragon of stone threw it sideways into the wall of the fort proper. Naruto's leaping sweep, blocked by the metal haft of the big red's hammer.

Hinata rolled under Naruto's attack, Minazuki parting red skin and sliding through white ribs, stopping in the thing's red heart. It convulsed once and collapsed completely, dead.

"Well that was intense," Tenten said as the three riflemen killed the last two colored gnolls.

"No kidding," Hinata agreed. She tore the sleeve from one of the dead soldier's uniforms to clean her blade with. She tossed it to Naruto next.

"Fucker's huge," the blond added, using and tossing the rag to Hinata.

"Should get going. They've heard the noise," Hinata announced, using her Byakugan to peer through walls."

"Lieutenant?" Naruto asked.

"Corporal?" Lieutenant Yoshimori asked in turn. One of the men examining the two corpses stood up and shook his head. "When you are, sir."

Naruto nodded his head and the soldiers and their borrowed weapons headed to the gates.

"Stay here," Naruto whispered to the Iron lieutenant, handing him Hinata's mic. She could watch him with her Byakugan, both read his lips and hand signs. They went over the wall and located Sergeant Kurosaki and his men without much fuss.

"my men are about a block back," Kurosaki whispered on the roof overlooking where the brown gnolls had roused and gathered, well lit with several torches and lamps in the growing light. "Spread your men out for maximum coverage. They are going to be taking fire from the fort gate, after we attack, but they won't be able to take a charge, so try to keep them from getting overrun."

"They are using a pair of Pattern '53's and only about ten rounds apiece so their fire will be limited."

"Understood Captain, Sergeant." Naruto nodded and the Fire Sergeant turned away to get his men in position. Naruto waited a few minutes for the Fire soldiers to prepare before clicking his mic and signaling for attack. A hundred Naruto clones erupted and fell from the roof tops. The eleven rifles cracking away three times, Tenten included. Jiraiya led off with a fireball, Pressure and Flame Bullets, Great Breakthroughs with blades and Rasengans for those who rushed into melee. A third of the gnolls in the courtyard were cut down in the opening volley.

Three clones died in the first few seconds, the clones detonating far more power than they should have, taking an equal number with them. Half a dozen gnolls got trapped in Jiraiya's Swamp of the Underworld, Naruto flash stepping between the mired gnolls and taking their heads. Hinata was a whirlwind, reaping gnolls as she flowed between them, snapping necks and arms, cutting hands and throats and piercing eyes. Rapier and senbon twinkled as blood spurted and monsters collapsed.

Tenten emptied her rifle as the three below tore through the gnolls. She put her rifle away in a seal and followed Naruto down into the melee. The riflemen, those from both sides put down a withering rain of fire, sending many scrambling for cover. Tenten and Jiraiya each created an Earth-style Dragon to tear through tents and rend limbs.

It wasn't until the wizard made his presence known that things got hairy. A bar of yellow fire lanced out from the palisade wall, cutting a swathe through the mass of clones. A chain of detonations erupted behind it, wiping out many of the clones. A second lance reached out, one of the buildings around the plaza going up like a tinderbox.

"Definitely not a magician," Jiraiya commented over the radio.

"No shit," Naruto replied. Another explosion. "Gah! We need to do something about him. He has remarkably good aim. Hasn't really hit any of his own troops."

"Tenten, stay back behind us out of sight and load a wind bullet. When I give the signal, put it in his eye. Naruto leave enough clones down here to keep the grunts occupied. The rest of us will face the wizard."

Naruto inhaled and threw his hands together in the Shadow Clone Technique's cross seal. A thousand clones filled the rooftops, blond hair the only thing in sight. The clones parted to let them through to the wizard as the forward ranks surged forward, a few dying and exploding on from the gnoll's first attacks.

The wizard was not hiding at all, still perched on the palisade wall, a rod and staff in his hands, the end of the rod and carved runes glowing with a hellish light, the yellow, orange and red light casting shadows across the spellslinger's face.

"STOP!" The mage called imperiously. "I am Magus Oga , Wizard of the First Order, Council Warden. You are trespassing on my land."

"This is the Land of Iron, under the rule of the Governor-General Mifune. By what authority do you claim this area?" Jiraiya asked.

"My own," the man who called himself Oga replied. "I have reached into the land of eternal night and terror to bring fourth these my beasts of burden, the tools of my ascension and rule. You are shinobi, foreigners in this land. I have no quarrel with you so I will graciously allow you and your followers to depart unmolested right now."

"What do you need so many prisoners for? Are you going to demand Mifune step down or you will kill all your hostages?"

"What concern is it of yours what use I have of my people?"

"There are civilians, people that are innocent of whatever quarrel you have with Mifune."

"This is my land and they are my people! You will leave immediately or I shall kill you here."

"This is your only chance to keep your life, Magus Oga. Command your troops to stand down and surrender yourself to out custody."

"Insolent dogs!" The comment had angered him, face flushed and clutching his staff and rod with white knuckles. I am a magus, one of the Wise! I am a Noble-Commander of the Wardens, a spell-slinger of the highest caliber! You do _not_ give me orders!"

Jiraiya said nothing, just tapping the mic at his throat. There was a deafening crack from behind them, and the wizard staggered, a translucent blue shell with a hole in it appeared for a moment before fading away.

"Fools!," Oga snarled. "Did you think I would expose myself to danger without appropriately ensuring my safety? BEGONE!" Oga slammed his staff into the ground, blood staining the fabric of his robe around the hole in his arm that Tenten's bullet had left. A second shot rang out, not the deafening crack of a wind-nature bullet, but the way the round shattered Oga's shield even if it did not hit him meant it was likely an earth-nature bullet. The wizard was thrown off balance and dropped to the ground inside of the fort.

Naruto grimaced. Following him down would not be a problem but it would force Tenten to move to cover them. He briefly considered trying to make her go to support the Fire soldiers and realized the impossibility of that and changed his mind. "Let me!" Naruto shouted, creating a dozen shadow clones as he jumped off the wall and fell. The ground erupted as the first two clones touched down, a line of destruction through the earth connecting the two of them. A third shot sounded Naruto feeling the bullet pass from above and striking the wizard. Naruto looked up and saw Tenten crouching ten feet above him, a spirit platform supporting her. She winked at him and loosed a suppressive volley of six inert rounds emptying her rifle. She started pulling shells from her belt pouches as Jiraiya and Hinata took the covering the opportunity of the covering fire to enter the courtyard. Oga crossed his staff over his right arm and threw up a strong shield, blocking the full volley. His arm sank immediately, blocking her attack costing sapping his strength. Hinata was on him a moment later, the clones supporting her, all water walking across Jiraiya's Swamp of the Underworld. The wizard brought his staff to bear clipping Hinata in the knee and destroying the clones with a lance of force. Jiraiya leaped in to cover her, the mud rising to form an Earth-Style Wall. Sliding one foot back and the forward in a round house kick sending a two-foot tall section of the wall flying at the mage.

If there was one thing that Naruto and the others had to give him is that his defense was like greased lightning. Oga stood his ground, staff and hand crossed, catching the boulder. His body compressed, turning into a living spring to throw the thing back after an instant of complete compression with twice the force. Naruto flash stepped in, barely getting the pair out in time. Tenten slammed the last shell into her rifle and sighted. She did not fire though, mindful of her limited ammunition, electing to pick her shots for when they would do best. Naruto let go of Hinata the instant they were clear. The Hyuuga woman fell at him, slowing her fall with a column of liquid flame spewing from her lips. The fire dripped off his shield, no more affected by the heat than if it were a sunbeam. He replied with another force lance from his staff. It connected, making Hinata soar over a hundred yards straight up. The bracers she wore over her blunted some of the force, but she felt her bones fracture, her left possibly broken. She wasn't gone but a moment and then she was rocketing back down Hollow mask on and the sleeve of her right arm tearing, the muscle of her upper and lower arm suddenly sculpted with hard muscle. Her fists was chambered as she came down, loaded with Yin energy, striking just as she got in range. A cloud of dust erupted, partially obscuring sight. Naruto thought he heard a gurgle as the dust settled, but that couldn't have when he saw what Hinata had done.

His arms were near snapped in half, as was his staff, but his eyes had popped and his abdomen was pulp. Naruto was in Hinata in a flash, catching her bridal style as she swayed and fell. "Hinata!"

"Not so loud, Naruto-sama. I am right here."

"Are you okay?" Naruto asked as he set her down.

"Nothing that won't heal, I think my left arm is broken, and I know I did some damage to my right with that last attack." Hinata grimaced suddenly, sitting up a little in surprise, arms cradling her stomach. "Ah, just chakra exhaustion. I used a lot in that last attack."

"You're staying here then," Naruto told her, tone accepting no excuses. Hinata just nodded, wincing at the stab of pain in her gut.

"Here," Tenten said, pulling out a soldier pill. Hinata took it gratefully as went limp as the pain of the exhaustion faded. Her arms were still damaged, so Naruto left a twelve-clone guard around her. Tenten mounted the wall, sweeping the barrel of her rifle across the battle, searching for someone to shoot with her scope. She fired off three inert rounds a second and a half later, dropping three brown gnolls. Naruto and Jiraiya bounded over either side of her and landed on the rooftops of the nearest buildings. The group of gnolls in the courtyard had been greatly thinned, less than twenty left to the thirty-five clones. The group of Iron soldiers had expended their ammunition, most affixing their kunai to the end of the barrel of their gone with a makeshift mount. One of the prisoners was either wounded or dead and three white gnolls spread out behind them.

A pair of clones from a new batch peeled off to see what was going on as the rest continued on to the main fight. Tenten continued to drill rounds downrange, coming within inches of the others on her team. Most of the gnolls that remained had large shields of wood and bronze, forming a phalanx, clubs and long swords keeping the soldiers and clones far enough away that their shields could protect them from the detonations.

"We have a bit of a standoff here," Sergeant Kurosaki said. "We don't have the ammunition to pierce their shields, and they have longer reach and superior strength. We could use some ninja help right about now."

"Do none of my wind techniques work?"

"No. They set their feet and none of your wind techniques can budge them."

"What about Rasengan?"

"There are enough of them that they can deal with a broken arm or two."

"Well, good thing we have a earth specialist with us. Tenten!" Naruto called over the radio. "We have some bowling pins knocked down!"

Tenten came rocketing into the plaza, landing just ten feet from the gnoll shield line and making a full–body thrusting motion at them. A stone outcropping exploded out of the ground six feet from the shieldwall. Three of the gnolls were thrown bodily from their feet aalong with those immediately behind them. The Naruto clones surged, using Rasengans to tear through lightly armored bodies.

And as quickly as that it was over. Tenten took two bounding steps and mowed the last four gnolls with pistols akimbo.

"Ha! _ALWAYS_ wanted to do that!"

"Oh yeah?" all the Naruto clones replied in synch.

"Hell yeah! Guns are awesome! Just stroll in and nail four baddies in a split second with my trench coat flaring. I am a bona fide badass now!"

"That was pretty cool ma'am," one of the Fire soldiers said.

"Private Kirishima, right?" she asked.

"Yes ma'am. I heard that you had a pair of Moses Brothers pistols. I see that is true."

"They made less than two hundred Model B Frontier Self Defense Engines, all officer sidearms for the Fire Country's First Regiment, the elite Stormtroopers." Chimed another.

Yeah," a third agreed. "The Model B is unjammable and shoots like a laser. I heard that you could submerge it in mud, bake it, freeze it, it will still fire and hit what it is aimed at."

"What is going on Naruto-sama?" Hinata asked, arriving with the prisoners.

"Tenten showing off," Naruto told her with a twist to her grin. "She jumps in at the last second and blows the last four gnolls away using both guns at once."

"It's called guns akimbo, Naruto-sama," Tenten corrected from her place in the middle of the soldiers.

"Guns akimbo," Naruto said with a laugh.

"So everyone is alright?" Hinata asked.

"Yeah. The only ones hurt are beyond any help."

"That is good, Naruto-sama."

"Do we want to stay here tonight?" Father Alexander asked, stepping forward out of the crowd.

"I don't see why not," Jiraiya said with a shrug. "The report should go out tonight, just in case Mifune did something we don't know about. We have done everything and more he could have asked of us and we can wait until after breakfast and we have tended our wounds before setting out for Sand."

"I for one vote for the second option," Hinata said, her arms already bandaged up.

"Me as well," Tenten called again from in her crowd of soldiers.

"I think that about settles it," Father Alexander said in turn.

"There's got to be enough room in the fort for everyone and they have a cafeteria and have got to have a kitchen to feed everyone in."

"We can assess and repair our condition and see precisely how we are on provisions and the rest, as well as make the report to Mifune before leaving for Sand," said Jiraiya, agreeing with Tenten.

It took just under twenty minutes to relocate everyone to the mess hall and all the equipment inventoried. Hinata had her field bandages removed and her wounds tended to with the gathered medical supplies, her arm resplinted with fresh bindings.

"I guess I will have to write this one myself," Naruto said, looking for pen and paper to write the report.

"I have told you that your handwriting is not that bad," Hinata said in a tone for an old argument.

"If you insist. Anyways, it doesn't matter in the end I suppose."

"Some see a degree of significance in receiving a latter in one's own hand, but for the most part nobody cares."

Another twenty minutes and Kosuke was delivering Naruto and the others on their way to Sand. Once again, it was the ninja, not the soldiers that were pressed to keep up the pace. Mifune's reply was as quick as the distance allowed. Everyone was finishing breakfast, only an hour later, when his came. As Jiraiya thought, it was merely a thank-you letter, acknowledging the completion of their mission.

They made a good fifty miles before stopping for the night. It was full dark before either group sat down to eat. "You planning on going with the same speech that you gave Urashima when we get to Sand? Jiraiya asked.

"Dunno. Depends on who is in charge when we get there, I suppose."

"Far enough," Jiraiya allowed.

"What about Gaara? Do you think that he could be an ally?" Hinata queried.

"I hope so but I only saw him the one time when he got ransomed out. I hope that he can evaluate the evidence on its own weight, if he is not willing to take my word."

"Your evidence is kinda circumstantial," Tenten said with a shrug. "Hey, just playing devil's advocate here," she said at Naruto's dark look.

"Just don't tell that to whoever we end up dealing with in Sand," he grumbled.

"Oh come on. You can't possibly believe that I would shoot you in the foot like that." Her expression said that she knew that he did not believe what he said and was not going to play along.

"I dunno," Naruto replied stubbornly. "You have been spending a lot of time with Mom before we left. And I could see her doing just that if she though it would do no harm." He nodded decisively as he folded his arms over his chest.

Tenten's frown turned into a full scowl. "I can't believe that you believe I would do something like that! I would never talk to another person from Konoha about anything you told me, let alone a foreigner."

"And to think that I used to think of you as the quiet one."

OoOoO

"Wonder what Naruto did," Jiraiya told Hinata, reacting to a shout from Tenten directed at Naruto.

"Said something that sounded innocent to him, but not to Tenten," Hinata said confidently. "He really needs to learn to think before he says anything if he ever wants to be Hokage."

"Hey, you two are married to him. I am just his teacher. And not a good one for becoming Hokage. That is squarely on your shoulders."

"Thank you ever so much, Jiraiya-sensei."

"Forget about it," Jiraiya said with a grin and shake of his head. He sobered quickly though. "We are going to Sand next. This is where we see just how determined to make his plan work, how far he will go to make his idea a reality. To tell the truth, whether or not he become Hokage will be decided on the success or failure of his mission. Tsunade wants to see if he has the ability to lead, or whether his actions during the invasion were a fluke. He has received some high praise from several high-ranking shinobi. Tsunade hasn't said anything to the boy to keep him from getting a big head, but I personally believe that she is hoping that he succeeds. She never wanted the Hokage's hat in the first place. I am sure that she is hoping that she could hand it off to him sooner rather than later if he comes back with success." Jiraiya looked at her. "And it is up to you and Tenten to make sure that he can act in a manner befitting a Hokage if she gives him the hat."

"If he succeeds, that will be the easy part."

OoOoO

**A/N:** So this has to have been one of the easiest chapters to write in Jinchuuriki Tales. Already started working on chapter 10 and it is coming along smoothly. Don't have as much schooling this semester, so I will have a little more time to write.


	10. Sand

**Chapter Ten: Sand**

**Having secured support from both the Hokage and Mifune, Governor-General of iron, Naruto and his team travels to the Village Hidden in Sand to try to convince Gaara, the Jinchuuriki of the Ichibi, to join his group.**

Naruto woke the first morning out of Fort Imran to find Jiraiya studying the strange crystal that had fallen out of the big red gnoll leader. Most of the Fire soldiers had given the dead monsters a wide berth when they each were swallowed in their own personal cloud of dark smoke, which when dissipated revealed painstakingly carved stone statues, only about half their living size. Jiraiya had immediately rushed off back to where the big red lay slain, just in time to give a warning shout to one of the former prisoners as he reached for a roiling ball of midnight smoke that lay near the remains of the big red.

Naruto, naturally curious, asked what was going on.

"I will tell you if that is what I think it is." Jiraiya would say nothing more on the matter, instead unrolling his large luggage scroll and searching the seals until he found the one he sought. He donned the red lobstered steel gauntlets that he unsealed and reached into the smoke. After a moment and a bit of struggle, he withdrew a peculiar crystal. It looked like a round-cut diamond, except that it was the size of his palm.

And it was beautiful. It caught the light and trapped it, shining with its own inner luminescence. "What is it?" Naruto asked.

"An erg crystal. Crystallized magic. I have never seen one this large. They are usually the length of your smallest finger. This one… If that wizard could make an erg crystal this large there is no doubt that he could power the kind of ritual to create or bring over these creatures."

"Do you know why the gnolls turned to stone?"

"I couldn't say for certain. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the wizard had used some kind of animation ritual to bring the statues to life, and tied the ritual to his life in some manner."

Naruto nodded. "Seems likely," he agreed. "What about that smoke? Why didn't you want anyone to touch it?"

"This erg crystal was the heart of what I believe was a darkness core. It is supposed to be a sort of binding ritual, to make sure that this Oga didn't lose control of his troops I am sure. It is mind magic, with no way to predict what it could do if someone had touched the smoke without protection."

"And that is what the gauntlets were for?"

Jiraiya gave him a flat look. "No, I put them on because I like the way they make my eyes stand out."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Keep it," Jiraiya replied. "Study it. See it if I could replicate it with chakra. Erg crystals are essentially mana batteries for spellslingers. They are used to power magical rituals, automatons and sometimes clockwork constructs, or be used as a mana reserve that can be used to refresh a mage's magical stores.

"Chakra is harder to store in such a manner, as it is both mental and physical energy. Physical energy does not lend itself well to storage, and chakra tends to leech from a physical storage medium. There are a few seals that can store chakra and none that do so outside a person's body. There have been many shinobi sealing adepts that have tried, but I have never had such a large crystal to study. Maybe there will be something I can learn from such a large crystal."

"Is there a special type of crystal that should be used?" Tenten asked, she and Hinata being drawn over to their conversation.

"Yes. Erg crystals can only only be created from extremely rare, naturally occurring deep crystal. Deep crystal is much stronger than mundane crystal and magically resonant, which is the reason why they can store mana. However, one cannot just pick up a chunk of deep crystal and expect it to store mana. Erg crystals work by trapping mana in its crystalline structure. As a result, deep crystals are graded the same way that gemstones are to determine its suitability to be used as an erg crystal. The better the carat, clarity, and cut, the more mana it can hold. And while an imperfect crystal can be used as an erg crystal, anything that would cause a real gemstone to leak light, like inclusions or imperfectly cut facets would cause an erg crystal to leak mana.

"Once the crystal has been cut, it must then be alchemically treated to accept a magical charge. One of the really tricky things about erg crystals is that the magical charge must match the size of the crystal precisely. If it is not charged to capacity, it will slowly leak power. And if it is overcharged, it could damage the crystal, potentially weakening it to the point that it could explode. By its nature, mana is imprecise, difficult to measure or regulate, so each mage tends to make his own, so that he knows how much of a charge it holds. Arcane smithing is not an uncommon profession among mages, but it is not an uncomplicated process, requiring more power the larger the crystal. Between the power requirements and the natural limitation on the size of the crystal, they are usually not much bigger than your thumb.

"Figure out a way to incorporate one into a seal array, either through a mechanical device of some sort or another seal, you would have every adept in the world begging, demanding, plotting and conspiring to learn how."

"I can see how that would be very valuable knowledge indeed," Hinata said in an agreeing tone. Jiraiya bounced the erg crystal on his palm twice more before finding and empty seal in his scroll and put it away.

"Do you actually expect to learn anything?" Naruto asked.

"If there is anything structurally or magically differently, I will find it. If we are lucky Oga will have used a new process that I can reverse-engineer and adapt to our use."

"How much energy is in that thing?" Tenten asked.

"Enough for one of you to fight like Naruto for maybe ten minutes."

That made both kunoichi whistle. When Naruto went all out he could drown an opponent in chakra if he tried. Both his partners had trained to expand their chakra reserves but Naruto outstripped most jounin. To give even just a handful of jounin that kind of ability, it would be a game changer in Konoha's favor. Six Jiraiyas, Tsunades or Sarutobis would be a devastating force on the battlefield. One of each could turn the tide of a battle. Two or three could dominate it completely. There were few enough S-rankers in the world that six more for Konoha would seriously tilt the balance of power, and Naruto said so.

"Indeed. If I could figure out a way to manufacture chakra crystals even a fraction the size of this one, it would be a major boon to Konoha."

"No kidding. They sound way more useful than regular soldier pills."

"They would be, assuming I ever crack the process."

"I don't suppose you could just find a wizard or something and ask for help."

Jiraiya gave him a flat look. "If it were that easy, someone would have done it long before now."

"Just a thought," Naruto replied.

"I know you got a brain in there Naruto. The trick is just getting you to use it all the time."

Naruto scowled.

OoOoO

Of all the Hidden Villages in the world, only the Village Hidden by Clouds was more remote than Sand. The Land of Wind consisted of three major landforms. The first was the Great Thirst, the great trackless erg that covered ninety-five percent of Wind. Second was the Green Strip, a strip of land between five and ten miles wide that ran along the coast supporting ninety percent of Wind's population. Third and last was the Taran Battlewaste, the devastated, broken and desolate reg that formed heart of the Thirst and Wind, one of the several landforms created during the Third World War.

The trip took several days. They traveled during the day while in Iron, but as they drew close to the Sand-Iron border on the second day after setting out from Fort Imran, they began traveling at night.

"You have got to be kidding," Tenten groaned as the group crested a rise on the first night of travel, seeing the endless, featureless sandscape spreading out before them.

"Welcome to Sand," Jiraiya said with a grin as he passed her, handing her a sandcloak to replace her trench coat.

"No kidding," she muttered as she wrapped the tan cloth around her body, sighing and following him. "Any lessons to offer us, Jiraiya-sensei?" Tenten asked somewhat sourly as her feet sank into the sand a little.

"Actually yes," Jiraiya replied in an overly casual tone. "Three techniques in fact. Although we are going to be traveling at night, we probably will have need of them at some point in this trip.

"As a note, wind element affinity is nearly universal in Suna, so the first technique is actually a wind technique. Stormwalker is a technique that creates two bubbles of chakra around yourself, the first and outer one charging anything that passes through it with your chakra and the second and inner bubble repels the charged particles to prevent friction burns to skin and abrasion damage to equipment. With training it can grant limited perception within the bubble, allowing the user to see when the enemy is completely blind."

"Handy technique for the desert," Naruto commented.

"Very," Jiraiya agreed. "And most of the reason why nobody every attacks Sand. Imagine this: the Hokage has ordered you to lead an attack on Sand. You have reviewed all the available intelligence, planned your attack to the T, done your due diligence. Having done everything you can to prepare yourself and your men, you bring them out into the desert to execute the attack. Desert travel is tiring though so you decide to travel by night and set up camp twenty miles away from where you know Suna's outermost scouts are. So far everything has gone according to plan. It is always windy in the desert, so your scouts don't notice when the wind starts picking up a little. They are not Sand ninja though, so they have very little experience dealing with desert weather. They have been told how quickly a sandstorm can arrive, but never having experienced one, they don't really believe it.

"What you and your scouts don't know is that despite all your stealth, all your careful preparation and precautions, the Sand ninja know that you are there. What you don't know is that there are a couple dozen Suna genin a couple miles away each wielding one of those giant fans that blond Sand kunoichi Tenten fought in the Chunin Exam used. I am sure you remember how strong it made her wind techniques. Now imagine what thirty fan-wielding Sand ninja working in concert could do. In the span of time it takes one of your guards to smoke a cigarette, that gentle breeze that your scouts are feeling has turned into a stiff wind, just starting to pick up a little sand. The wind keeps blowing, getting slightly stronger for every second that passes. Then, just as the flying grit is starting to become a nuisance and your guards start to wonder if there is something wrong and they should radio the base, that stiff wind turns into a gale.

"All of a sudden your sight goes from tens of miles to under a foot. Your scouts try to use their radios to contact your base, only to find out that the sandstorm has fried their electronic. So not only are you blind but you are deaf as well. You and your men have trained for this attack, so you give the order to wake everyone up and prepare for attack. However, the Sand ninja have been following the storm, so while your men are scrambling to follow your orders, the enemy ninja attack.

"If you are smart, you have ordered all your men to keep the goggles and rebreathers that everyone was issued for the mission on hand. So you and your men can still see and breathe, byt you have to make sure that your protective gear remains undamaged. If your rebreather gets clogged or your goggles crack, you are in trouble. Also, you just lost any techniques that needs breath or spit. That means most fire and water techniques have been rendered unusable."

"So these are Sand techniques, right? How is it you know how to do them?" Tenten asked.

"I have my ways," Jiraiya said in a deliberately sly tone.

"I am pretty certain that I don't want to know any more," Naruto replied.

"Your loss," Jiraiya said with a shrug. "Anyways, the first and second parts of the technique are pretty easy. Basically you take a second-stage Rasengan and blow it up, big enough to surround you and do it again on a smaller scale."

"Sounds simple," Naruto said.

"For you, it's gonna be cake. For Hinata and Tenten, probably a little harder. The first stage requires more power than control, which is right up your alley."

"No kidding," Hinata commented.

"Indeed. You could easily cover a hundred square yards or more without straining yourself. Anyways, the second technique, sandstride, is much like water walking, insofar as you channel chakra to your feet. Too little, you sink. Too much, you bounce and leave tracks a blind man could follow, and potentially cause a sandslide and bury yourself if you go up the wrong side of a dune.

"And lastly, sunblock is pretty much the opposite of stormwalk, requiring control over power. However, it requires a slightly different style of chakra control than you are used to. What do you guys know about chakra frequency and Hinata is not allowed to answer." Hinata scowled.

Naruto gave Jiraiya a blank look. "It's the way a person's chakra vibrates, and each person's is supposed to be completely unique," Tenten answered.

"Correct," Jiraiya said a little surprise in his voice. "Most of the time chakra control means hand seals and chakra form which is easy. Altering one's chakra frequency is a little more difficult but obviously not impossible.

"Frequency modulation can be tricky to get the hang of, but isn't excessively difficult once learned. It does not have many uses, hiding from sensors generally being the most prominent, but can be used to replicate another person's signature."

"Good way to confuse pursuit, I would think, if you have a VIP you are escorting or something you stole. Have someone mimic the signature of the person with the package, working with the assumption that the pursuers got a whiff of him, force the chasers to split up."

"Precisely," Jiraiya said with a grin. "You have a brain in there when you choose to use it." Naruto scowled.

"And keep a sharp eye on where you step. There are a dozen different mammals and reptiles smaller than your arm that can kill you in five minutes or less. There are even more plants of equal deadliness, so don't get curious as to what a cactus tastes like. Cave bears can be dangerous, especially if we find a whole sleuth of bears. It isn't uncommon to find a pack of wolves or hyenas around a cave as well."

"And these all come out at night?"

"Given the choice, when would you come out?"

"Point," Naruto admitted.

"And the desert is not as inhospitable as you might think. It does rain here, just not very much or frequently. An inch in a year is good."

Naruto whistled. "That is crazy. But it makes everyone's reliance on wells and oases make more sense though."

"Exactly. When you get as little rain as the desert does, having a reliable source of potable water is critical. You can go three weeks or so without food, but only three days without water, less if you don't know how to handle yourself in the desert."

OoOoO

The Hidden Village of Sand was built into a large protective outcropping of brown stone in the Battlewaste of Taran. It was four in the morning when twenty Suna shinobi rose in a ring around the group a hundred yards from Suna. Everyone froze, making sure to keep hands well away from weapons and looking as unthreatening as possible.

"Name and affiliation!" the lead guard barked. One at a time, the Sand guards checked everybody's IDs, pulling Naruto aside when he said that it was his mission.

"Hyuuga Naruto, Konoha chunin, number 012607, on a diplomatic mission to speak with the Suna leadership."

The guards would not let all the soldiers into the village, so Naruto was told that he could pick five of his entourage to enter the village with him. Hinata, Tenten and Jiraiya were obvious picks of course, and the other two were the Cardinal and Sergeant Kurosaki. The rest were provided tents, supplies, and instructions on where and how to strike them to protect both them and their tents.

Naruto and his honor guard were escorted through the streets with twice as many Suna guards. They were deposited in a motel on the other side of town from the Kazekage's tower. One of the guards gave Naruto pen and paper and told him to write down what he wanted and wax to seal it. The guards looked over his shoulder as he wrote, the fact that Jiraiya was his sensei making them guard against a seal of some sort.

One of the Suna-nin dashed away with Naruto's missive, Naruto told that they were to remain there and wait for a reply. A good deal of commercial traffic traveled by night, Suna-nin pretty much the only people who traveled during daylight. That meant that the Sand leadership was usually operating at the early hours of the morning, which in turn meant between the facts that they were already up and that they were from the Land of Fire, who's Hidden Village they had failed to conquer, the council was absolutely willing to meet with him immediately.

They made quick time to the Kazekage's Tower. Several Suna-nin following them in so the councilors were not outnumbered. As in Konoha, it seemed that the village had a council of elders running the show, old, politically influential shinobi who took charge when their Kazekage was unable to.

Naruto and the rest gave the already seated councilors a shallow bow before sitting themselves. "Good morning Councilors," Naruto said, surprising the Suna-nin who had clearly expected Jiraiya to make the introductions. "I am Hyuuga Naruto, chunin of Konoha. My companions are my master, Jiraiya the Sennin, of the Sannin. Hyuuga Hinata, genin and teammate. Higurashi Tenten, genin and teammate as well."

"We are Yoshimori of the Spring, Miu the Hawk and Kumada the Boar," the man with a head of thick white hair and a buzz cut. Miu was ancient, eyes slitted, deep-seated among deep wrinkles. Kumada the Boar was a bear of a man, looking a well-preserved fifty. Steel grey hair was swept back, fists set on knees, loose pants and jacket showing off a powerful build.

"May we now know what it is you wish to discuss with us?" the white-haired Yoshimori asked.

"Your note did not give us much from which to guess what you want, Naruto-san. Are you here as a representative from Konoha?"

"We know the role you played in our defeat," Kumada continued.

"No, I am here in no official capacity. The matter I wish to discuss with you is of a completely unrelated topic. Have any of you ever heard of an independent mercenary organization calling itself Akatsuki?"

The three councilors exchanged a silent look as politicians and old women where prone to, communicating telepathically for all Naruto knew before shaking their heads.

"Not surprising. They are an organization of nine shinobi, the seven known members all S-rank missing-nin. Their unknown Leader has stated their mission to be the acquisition of all nine Jinchuuriki, for what purpose we do not know. However, their goals could be considered somewhat irrelevant, as there is no good purpose for collecting all the Bijuu."

Another moment was taken to let the councilors exchange significant looks. "And how do you know all this?" Yoshimori asked.

"One of Akatsuki's members ran into one of Jiraiya's agents a couple of years ago and he has been keeping an eye on them ever since."

"And you came to warn us, is that all?"

"No. I was actually hoping to speak to Gaara."

"What do you want with our Jinchuuriki?" Miu asked, suspicion sharp in her tone.

"It is related to the other reason why I am here. Given that Akatsuki's actions and goals, I am going to each of the Jinchuuriki nations asking their hosts to sit down at a summit I am going to be having in the Land of Iron, with the Governor-General Mifune acting as host and moderator. My ultimate goal is to form an organization of only Jinchuuriki, completely independent of any single nation's influence or control, a group for us Jinchuuriki to discuss the world's problem and try to solve them."

"So you want us to turn one of our most powerful weapons, our most valuable military asset into diplomats?" Kumada asked.

"Kind of, yes. You will be allowed to send representatives and a light guard with Gaara, should he choose to attend, but only we Jinchuuriki will have voting power."

"It is a power play," Miu snapped. "You think that because you are the Jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi, you should rule us all? Do you want all the other Jinchuuriki to gather so that you can kill them all and then there will be nobody to oppose you."

"Akatsuki is a threat to the entire world, not to us Jinchuuriki. If they are not stopped, Suna will not be the only ruins left."

"I agree Elder Miu. I will not agree to any meeting between the Jinchuuriki."

Naruto looked to Yoshimori. "I am sorry Naruto-san, but while we remain without a Kazekage, Suna will not be represented."

Naruto scowled.

"Excuse me for my impertinence, honored elders, but you are being rather foolish."

"And who are you?"

"Cardinal Hastings Alexander, of the Church of the Jah's Black Order." Father Alexander cut an imposing figure in his plain black cassock, scowling and with his hands folded behind his back. "The boy is not asking anything unreasonable, asking just for the chance to be heard. I have not personally encountered this Akatsuki, but Jiraiya's reputation as Konoha's spymaster is well known even in my circles. If he says that there is a threat to your Jinchuuriki, you should hear him out."

"We have heard him out, Cardinal. He has informed us of the threat, which we thank him for, but we do not wish to put our only Jinchuuriki in any more danger than necessary. And sending him off to a meeting in a foreign country, where he will be outnumbered by our foes."

"They are only your foes if you insist on making them so. And keep in mind that Mifune has agreed to host Naruto's group. If there is anyone who can guarantee the safety of your Jinchuuriki, it will be him."

"Nevertheless, we do not wish to take the risk. We have made our decision."

Nobody like it, but there was not anything anyone could do. "What about Gaara? Will I be allowed to see him?"

"You remain guests in our village for the time being. As long as you behave in a lawful manner, we will not prevent you."

"Good to hear." Naruto gave a little bow when he stood as he had when they entered, and left.

"Not good news, ma'am?" Kurosaki asked Tenten.

"No, not good news," she confirmed, speeding up to catch Naruto.

"You okay, Naruto-sama?" Hinata asked as Tenten flanked the blond man.

"I wasn't expecting to be greeted with flowers, but I had hoped for something more than getting the door slammed in my face. Hopefully Gaara will be able to help."

"The boy that by your own admission, you only met the once?"

"He said he had been asking about me when we talked," Naruto said. "That has to mean something. And the fact is that Jiraiya, my teacher, was the one to fix his seal so that he can sleep now."

"Okay, so there might be a chance that Gaara doesn't hate your guts," Tenten allowed, "but what do you think that he can do about the council?"

"Not a clue, and maybe he can't, but he does have an older brother and sister. If Gaara can't do anything, maybe they can. They were the last Kazekage's kids after all."

"I would like to rest first. I don't know about you, Naruto-sama, but walking through the desert is tiring."

"Sure. I doubt that Gaara and his brother and sister would be up in any case."

"I think that we all could use a rest," Father Alexander submitted.

They returned to the high security motel that they had been stashed in to a much nicer hotel where the security was much less visible. There was a sign outside with a spurt of water fountaining from a hole in the ground and no name. The Fire soldiers had to remain outside the walls, but allowed inside the village during daylight hours.

The Suna family lived in a modest house on the west side of the village, about half a mile from their lodgings. Everyone having to vie for the limited amount of space available in the outcropping, so even such an important family did not have much of a yard. Everyone waited outside the gate, just a few feet from the front door as the captain of their guard stepped inside to see if anyone would have them.

The lead guard stepped out and held the door open for them. Gaara and Temari were waiting inside, in a large and well-appointed sitting room, with a modest liquor cabinet. "Hyuuga-san," Temari said, voice carefully level. Gaara rose with her as she spoke,

"Temari-san, Gaara-san," Naruto replied in turn, Temari giving Jiraiya and the women a nod. "Thank you for meeting us on such short notice."

"To tell the truth, it was Gaara that wanted to see you, not I. What is it you want with us?"

Naruto took a few minutes to tell them about Akatsuki and their meeting with the council.

Gaara and Temari looked at one another when Naruto was done. "I am not asking you to agree to anything more than a sit down with the rest of us," Naruto told Gaara. "Iron's leader has agreed to let us meet in his country and try to keep things civil."

"I am not sure how much I can do, Naruto-kun," Gaara said levelly. "I am neither Kazekage nor on the council." He looked to Temari for a moment. "Temari and Kankuro tell me that I have to listen to what the council tells me to do. Before I met you, I did as I wished and was considered untrustworthy someone to be feared. I don't want to be like that anymore. You showed me that I could be different."

"At least tell them what you think. You are the Suna Jinchuuriki after all. Your opinion has to count for something," Tenten told him. Gaara nodded and left the room.

"Perhaps," Gaara allowed. "Most of the village still fears me. I am sure that the council would be willing to grant me an audience."

"That is something at least," Hinata said neutrally.

"Where are you staying?" Temari asked. "They probably put you up at the Wild Spring."

"I don't remember the name of the place. It isn't that far from here, like less than half a mile. Had a spout of water on the sign."

"It was the Wild Spring then. Pretty much the only place they would put someone like you."

"'Someone like me?' Should I be insulted?"

Temari rolled her eyes. "You are the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki, a shinobi from a more powerful village we failed to blow up and has the ear and confidence of the Fifth Hokage. So yeah, the council is going to want to know where you every second you are in the village."

"You don't say," Naruto replied, folding his hands over his chest and looking around. "Say, where's your brother anyways? The one with the dolls and make-up?"

"Probably training. He is always tweaking his puppets and trying out new ones."

"Training? I wouldn't have thought you guys would have the space in the village."

"We don't. We aren't like Konoha, Mist, Lightning or the rest. Out here we train in the desert surrounded by danger. Do you know how fast a sandstorm can come on?"

"I am guessing pretty fast."

"Try minutes. And if you do not know how to protect yourself, the desert will kill you as quickly. We don't have the resources to maintain a large shinobi corps so we compensate by training the few that we do to be the best they can be. And nothing brings out potential like being dropped in the middle of the desert for a week and told to survive."

"Harsh," Naruto said.

"Can't argue with results though. Suna does make up what they lack in quantity with quality," Jiraiya said.

"Not that we have a choice, what with our idiot daimyo and failed invasion," Temari said somewhat sourly as Gaara returned with his gourd of sand slung across his back.

"Come. I will speak to the council now." His tone was as flat and emotionless as ever but he moved quickly through the Suna crowds. The occasional villager would flag him down, hailing him with a shouted greeting and a wave, most those who called to him doing so with a smile. Naruto looked surprised.

"The villagers seem to have come around rather quickly."

"My sister has been helping me win their favor. Courting she calls it. She helped me write my speech for Father's funeral. And I teach a little at the Academy."

Naruto looked to Temari. She shrugged. "He says he wants to become Kazekage. Hard to do that when the villagers still fear for their lives."

"What do you teach?" Naruto asked Gaara.

"Chakra exercises mostly. Some desertcraft. Nobody knows how to survive out in the sand like I do or knows the surrounding area better. Mother- that is Shukaku the Ichibi, give me a much more refines desert sense than most."

"Jiraiya-sensei has been telling us about Suna desert tactics on the way here. Do you have a special unit of fan wielders here in Suna for that kind of battle?"

Temari nodded at Tenten's question. "As Mist is famed for their hunter-nin and Konoha for your ANBU Demolitions Corp, we have our Sand Hawks."

"May I assume you would like to join them some day?"

"You may. To tell the truth, most ninja don't get a fan like mine until they join the Sand Hawks, but I inherited mine from my mother. The Sand Hawk's captain says that I'll be ready to join in a year or two though."

Tenten gave her a carefully congratulatory nod. "I know what you mean. I would love to be able to join the Demolitions Corp, but they only recruit ANBU."

"Give yourself some credit," Jiraiya said. "Give it another decade or so. You don't have to be a jounin to join. Most ANBU are chunin. Given you were taught by Anko herself, I would be surprised if you never got in." Tenten gave Jiraiya an appreciative grin. "I am always telling you three not to sell yourself short. Anyone with half a brain would only call you weak in comparison to me."

"So, are you three still an item?" Temari asked after a moment.

"We are," Hinata answered slightly coolly.

"And how is that going?"

"Complicated," Hinata and Tenten answered simultaneously.

"Oh really?" Temari asked with an eyebrow and a grin.

"The Hokage won't let Naruto and I get married because he is already married to Hinata," Tenten said with a scowl in her voice. "But we are hoping that a friend in Mist might be able to help us."

"Sora, the Three-Tails Jinchuuriki, wouldn't make any promises but she did say that she could get us in to see the Mizukage."

"Well, here's to luck and hoping, Naruto-san," Temari replied, crossing her fingers.

"You are a lot friendlier than I was expecting," Tenten said abruptly.

"Why? Because you beat me in the Chunin Exams? Or because you defeated our invasion? You and your beat me and mine by being the stronger ones, simple as that. It is true that we lost a lot of good men and women in the attack, but Jiraiya-sama did fix Gaara's seal. And not to try to duck blame, but I was just following orders. I had nothing against Konoha personally."

"Mother is much quieter these days," Gaara chimed in. "It is much easier to control her."

Naruto remembered the mad light that he had seen in the Suna Jinchuuriki's eyes the last time they had fought, the uncaring calculations he made when interacting with other people, but that was all gone now.

"Your seal was deliberately incomplete. Fixing it was no favor. It was simply the right thing to do."

"Not all men would consider it so. Most would have simply killed my brother for his madness, his part in the invasion, for being an enemy Jinchuuriki. Instead you healed him and made him whole." She paused to bow. "You do not know what that means to us."

"I think you will find my apprentice and I are not most people."

Temari, Hinata and Tenten all grinned at that. "That is not something that my brothers or I would disagree on."

Conversation lapsed as the group entered the Kazekage's Tower. The guards on the ground floor made noise at letting the Konoha-nin in even lightly armed, but the two Sand siblings pulled rank and forced the guards to allow them entrance.

The elders were less than please at seeing the Konoha chunin again so soon but Gaara did not give them the opportunity to protest. "Naruto-kun has told me that you have heard his request and dismissed it out of hand. This… displeases me."

By definition the three elders of the interim council were old. As the saying went, there were old ninja and bold ninja, but there were no old, bold ninja. And while they were not in the habit of bowing to genin, this particular genin was also their Jinchuuriki who was quickly gaining favor with both civilians and ninja. They were not the Kazekage but he was the second son of the Fourth Kazekage and might someday become the Sixth or Seventh.

"I am sorry to hear that this makes you unhappy Gaara-sama," Miu, the crone of the trio said. "However we have made our decision after hearing everything your friend and his cohorts have had to say. Sand, and by extension you will have no part of this boy's folly."

"Naruto-kun is a friend of both me and this village. His master is the one who restored me to sanity when I was his prisoner. He has warned us of the threat that this Akatsuki poses. He had to do none of these things, but has and only asks for me to attend his meeting. He has asked for our help. I desire to grant it."

"And we thank him for the service he has provided our village but it does not change our position."

"That is… disappointing."

"Indeed it is," Hinata jumped in. "Especially as he is most of the reason why there is a Village Hidden in Sand at all. As you should know, the third Hokage, the one that your invasion nearly killed is our current Hokage's and Jiraiya-sensei's teacher. She was most unhappy to learn of your village's role in Sandaime-sama's injury. In fact, he would have probably died had Naruto-sama not convinced Tsunade-sama to return to the village. She did not seem to particularly care that it was one of our missing-nin, Orochimaru, that planned the attack and wounded Sandaime-sama. She and her advisors were all for gutting your village, requiring you to hand over business as well as pay war reparations, but Naruto-sama changed her mind. He is of the opinion that Suna would make a better friend when you know that your fate is up to us. You might want to reconsider your decision, lest he do the same."

Naruto hid the smile that rose at Hinata's tirade. It was mostly bullshit, but the Sand siblings would vouch for his character.

One of the councilors, Kumada, arched an eyebrow. "What, you happened to be in the room when your Hokage said these things?" His tone said that he was not buying what she was selling.

"Tenten-chan and I are his wives and partners. We go where he does, and often consults us when Godaime-sama seeks his council." Another exaggeration, but one that only served to enhance his reputation. The councilors leaned back and looked to one another, exchanging whispers. They all wore small frowns as they completed their discussion.

"What assurances can you make towards Gaara-sama's safety and wellbeing at these meetings?"

"Well, I can't do anything while he is traveling, but the entire idea is to foster brotherhood among our fellow Jinchuuriki. To that end, Mifune, of the Land of Iron has agreed to host, secure, and mediate the meetings, at least initially. Everyone will be allowed to bring twenty guards, but only Mifune, we Jinchuuriki and a single advisor while the group is in session."

"And what about leadership? Are you going to be the one leading it?"

"Leadership will be determined when it becomes relevant. And before I say anything else, let me promise that the sole aim of my group will be the takedown of Akatsuki. I hope that it will last after of course, but seeing as all Jinchuuriki-holding nations, great and small, will have a say through their Jinchuuriki, I think you can be reasonably sure that it won't be turned against you and Sand."

"You say that everyone will have an equal voice, but that is not strictly true. What about Water, Cloud and Earth? They each have two Jinchuuriki."

"Lightning and Stone hate each other, as I am sure you know. And Mist never has never had much of a relationship with either of them." The three councilors contemplated his plea. "Commit to just one meeting, if nothing else. If Gaara and his advisor do not like what they hear, they are free to walk." The councilors exchanged whispers as Naruto waited impatiently.

"What would you be willing to do to prove your sincerity?" the heretofore silent Yoshimori asked.

"What did you have in mind?"

"There is a band of bandit outlaws operating somewhere in the southern Thirst for some time now. They mostly occupy themselves with harassing the desert caravans out of the green towns. We have been having trouble locating their base, presumably some hidden oasis in the deep desert. Track the bandits down and put an end to their predations."

Naruto sighed. "That seems a little… simple. If it is just a matter of tracking down some outlaws, how come you have not done it by now?"

"These bandits are remarkably well organized and trained, and have avoided any decisive engagements with us or the national military."

"Rumor is that they might have a mole in the village." The elders glared at Temari but did not correct her.

"So you want to bring in outsiders to solve your problem."

"We would not be ungrateful if you were to flush out this mole during your investigation," Yoshimori said evenly.

Naruto smiled. "Give us what you got on these bandits and we will see what we can do." The three councilors inclined their heads and the doors behind them opened. "Thanks for the assist," Naruto said as the group left the tower.

"Is what you say true?" Gaara asked abruptly."

"Is what true?"

"What you say about Akatsuki."

Naruto gave him a look. "Bit late to be wondering if I am lying, you know. But yes, everything I have told you is as true as I know. I have no idea what Akatsuki wants with us and the Biju, but we don't necessarily need to know their end goals to want to stop them."

Gaara nodded in agreement and the rest of the walk back to the Sand siblings' residence was made in silence. Kankuro had returned home while they were out at the Tower. The middle sibling called out to Gaara and Temari from the kitchen.

"Do we have any leftovers from that pasta we had last night?" Kankuro asked.

"Look on the bottom shelf behind the veggies," Temari replied, entering the kitchen. "But pull your head out of your stomach for a moment. We have guests."

Kankuro closed the fridge door, surprise plain on his face when he saw who was with his brother and sister.

"Naruto and Jiraiya, right?"

"And Tenten and Hinata," Hinata cut in smoothly.

Kankuro nodded. "So what brings you to Sand?"

"Business, with your brother and the council," Naruto answered.

"He's trying to get all the Jinchuuriki to a sit-down in Iron," Temari explained.

Kankuro didn't insult him by laughing out loud, but his face clearly said what he thought. "And let me guess: the council shot you down."

"Only at first. Then Gaara made them listen." Kankuro shot his little brother a questioning look.

"The idea intrigues me," Gaara explained.

Kankuro shrugged. "Well, whatever. What are you doing now?"

"Your council wants help taking out some desert bandits that have been causing trouble."

"Yeah, we've heard about them. Call themselves the Freemen's Brotherhood because they don't bend knee to any lord, so they think that makes them better than us 'kneelers.' We haven't ever been sent out against them but they are supposed to be smoke, just about impossible to find."

"That is pretty much in line with what the councilors said. We are waiting on them to get us what intel they have on them and then we will be on our way." Kankuro nodded. "Is there anything else you can tell us that might help us find them?"

Kankuro shook his head. "I don't think any of us would mind going over the intel with you, but like I said, we have never been sent against them."

"He's right," Temari said. "Pretty much the only info we could give you is what everyone knows. They are mostly desert born and bred, ride camels or sand-sails. They wear these distinctive white masks that they decorate to tell which band they belong to. There are rumors that they are made with salvaged technology, with night-for-day vision and built in rebreathers because their eye holes usually glow."

"May I assume that you intend to leave after sundown?" Kankuro asked.

Jiraiya nodded. "If there is nothing else you can tell us, then I think we should return to our hotel to rest. If you want to help, show up at our hotel at six. We can spend dinner reviewing the council's intel and depart after. Any objections?" Naruto wasn't particularly tired at the moment, but know that he would be alter if he did not catch up on his rest soon, so he shook his head.

The beds at the Wild Spring were top-notch, as expected. Naruto found that he was more tired than he thought he was, the night spent walking on sand and scaling dunes having taken more out of him than he thought. Neither Hinata nor Tenten bothered to hide their exhaustion as they collapsed to their respective beds. It fell to Naruto to roll Tenten over and help her undress. Hinata, who was no less tire but more disciplined went after Naruto and collected the clothes that he left strewn on the floor. Hinata dumped them on him as he fell onto the mattress.

"Don't leave your clothes on the floor. I am your wife, not the maid," she admonished her husband as he just swept them off his back and rolled onto the bed and under the covers as Hinata sat down on the other side of the bed and piled her clothes neatly on the floor before getting under the covers as well.

It felt like Naruto had just closed his eyes and fallen asleep when he heard Jiraiya knocking at the door. "Go away," he called in response to the noise at the door. "It can't have been more than twenty minutes," he complained , the bed shifting as Hinata got up.

"It's 5:30, Naruto-sama. The courier with the Sand intelligence should be here soon if he isn't already."

Naruto rolled over, groaned and got up. Sure enough Jiraiya was Jiraiya was standing over a table in the middle of the room that was covered in papers, a brown document envelope with the wax seal broken partially visible.

"So?" Naruto asked as he emerged from his and Hinata's room. "Anything useful?"

"Yes and no. Plenty of intel, but not much that will help us find the buggers with certain speed. As far as Sand can tell, the Freeman's Brotherhood has no more than five hundred members, enough to be supported by a large oasis. They are remarkably well disciplined and equipped for bandit, riding camels or sand sailers. Their targets are mostly desert caravans containing perishable foodstuffs, although they do go after luxury goods as well, like silk, precious woods and metals. They go after any steel they can get their hands on which makes sense, as they don't likely have a steady supply of it. The notion that they are based out of an oasis is supported by the fact that they don't take any water wagons, instead pouring water and liquor out onto the sand. They even seem to have dumped a cask of Tokay." Jiraiya sounded as if the waste of the bourbon was the biggest loss of all.

"Our father made note of that as well," Temari said as she and Kankuro entered with dinner.

"Then your father was a man of distinction and taste, despite what he planned to do to my village."

Temari inclined her head at the old ninja. Taking a compliment from one of the true ninja masters was a compliment in and of itself. "Understandable, as everything points to the Brotherhood being made of true desert men. Liquor dehydrates, and anything that wastes water is a bad thing."

The four Konoha-nin helped themselves to the food while Temari and Kankuro looked over the papers.

"Anything of particular note?" Jiraiya asked after a few minutes.

"No," Kankuro said slowly. "At least nothing definitive that will help you find them. Just reports of caravans that have been attacks, inventories of lost cargo, junk like that. Really the only help we can give is some tips about desert fighting. Try to use the landscape against them, but don't expect to do it better than them. Watch your footing and try not to get lured into a sandtrap or quicksand."

"And take out their animals or transport if you can. Whoever falls behind will be left behind. Tear the sail or break one of the runners to disable a sand sailer. If they strike in a sailer, it wil be from a direction that will let them use the prevailing winds to aid their escape. You have sand cloaks, but you will still perspire and tire quicker than your targets will."

"You say that then you obviously do not know me very well," Naruto replied.

"Fighting in the desert is different than fighting at home. While you do have far more stamina than most, what she says is not wrong. And should we find ourselves traveling during daylight, we will be wearing sunblock, whether or not you think you need it," Jiraiya added. "And everyone is going to be carrying water with them. Thirty gallons each is less than a month's supply, especially if we spend time moving in daylight." Jiraiya paused, a thought occurring to him. "Temari-san, has the Brotherhood attacked any oases or wells?"

In the desert, water was life, so it wasn't a question of if a water source was developed and populated, but by whom. The only abandoned wellsprings or oases were those which had been poisoned or despoiled in some way, or not discovered.

"No, but that should not be too surprising. The Brotherhood only has so many men, and they have to know that the army would come down on them like a ton of bricks if they started raiding settlements."

"No lord could allow regular organized attacks on his population. Limit yourself to foreigners and merchants?" Jiraiya asked.

"And you likely would not be considered the expense of being hunted down," Temari answered. "And it decreases the chance of your hidden base being found out if there is no one hunting you."

"Alright, so there is not much there to help us find them. What about equipment and training? Any specifics?" Tenten asked.

"Good and better," Jiraiya told her. "Good steel, mostly made into scimitars and the like. A handful of older firearms and ammo to go with. The bandit themselves tend to lightly armored, if armored at all, nothing heavier than boiled leather and chainmail. As you might expect from raider outlaws, they seem to value speed over protection."

"What about numbers?" Naruto asked.

"The Kazekage seemed to think that the Brotherhood is being led by a former Army colonel by the name of Temujin who is mostly responsible for the Brotherhood's numbers, equipment and training. Reports put the Brotherhood's numbers at three hundred or so. The Brotherhood operates in bands of two to three dozen or so, each band being led by one of Temujin's lieutenants."

Both Kankuro and Temari nodded . "He was supposed to be some kind of rising bigshot in the army before he deserted."

"That would fit with the reports," Jiraiya agreed. "They seem to go after critical supplied first and foremost, and then only after the luxury goods. On the other hand, they don't kill or rape much, unlike what you might expect. Few and fewer casualties on the raiders side as well, even against strong guards. That may work for us though."

"Try to break morale?" Tenten asked.

"Would it work?" Hinata asked.

"Couldn't say for certain," Temari said with a shrug. "Although given everything else, I wouldn't put money on it."

"What about the soldiers?"

"We would move faster and be safer without them. We are going to be easy enough to track as is. There will be no hiding with a dozen foreign soldiers in tow." Jiraiya looked to Temari. "I don't suppose that you could convince your elders to host our soldiers while we are on their errand."

"They will."

"Do you have the authority to say so?"

"I do. They can take it up with me if they don't like it."

"If you say. Any other questions?" he asked his students. Nobody said anything. "Alright, Naruto, let's get a few more seals made to hold the water. Hinata-chan, Tenten-chan, go down and inform the sergeant and his men of the change in plans."

The girls nodded and left, the two Sand siblings going with them. The sergeant had gone down to check on his men, make sure that they had been properly supplied by their Sand guards. The women found him in what seemed to have been set up as the squad's command tent. Sergeant Kurosaki rose to his feet and snapped a salute. "Ma'am, ma'am. Is there something you need?"

"We just came down to let you know that you and your men will be remaining here in Suna while Naruto-sama and the rest of us are on a mission."

"This isn't to be taken as a mark against your performance though," Tenten told him. Kurosaki nodded.

"May I ask how long we will remain here?"

"Until we return," Hinata said.

"Very well. However, I do want to say that I cannot protect Naruto-san if my men and I are not with him."

"We know, Sergeant and we will now hold you responsible for anything that happens." He gave a reluctant nod to Hinata.

"Is there anything else?" Hinata shook her head and ducked out the flaps that served as his door with Tenten. The sun was touching the top of the outcropping that served as the village walls as the women reentered the village. They stuck to street level as they headed back to the hotel. Naruto and Jiraiya had almost finished in the ten minutes that the pair had been gone.

"Sun is about to go down," Hinata said as they returned.

"Good. You two have everything sealed away?"

"We do," Tenten told Jiraiya.

"Go grab all our scrolls then and bring them in here. We want to go as soon as we are done making these seals and collect the water."

The women nodded and did as they were asked. It was only another few minutes before Naruto and Jiraiya were done with the seals, packed the water away and were ready to leave.


End file.
